A beautiful season

"I hate working in the garden," snarls my oldest son. I ignore him because, according to my newest expert book on child rearing, "Animal Training Techniques for Parents Who Have Tried Just About Everything and Are Totally Desperate," I must ignore the behaviors I don't want and reward the behaviors that I do want. Right now I want my boys to help me plant the garden. They're not showing any signs that they're even remotely interested in doing this and, according to the book, I shouldn't force them to do anything they don't initiate themselves, either purposefully or accidentally.

On the other hand, I need to get this garden in sometime this century, so I decide to help things along.

"I'll make shakes as soon as it's done," I tell them. This particular bribe works because, as a part of my laissez faire approach to parenting and also to encourage them to at least fantasize about living on their own, I'm no longer making meals for them on a regular basis, and so, since it's nearly noon and they haven't yet figured out how cereal in a box, bowls in a cupboard, spoons in a drawer and milk in the fridge all come together, they're starving.

Eventually, we all make it out to the garden. I'm armed with a map of what is to be planted where, a rake, a hoe, some stakes, string, seed packets and a lot of determination. I'll need that last thing in the face of all this decided lack of enthusiasm. Currently, they're standing around the garden perimeter, looking at me as though I'm an evil overseer and they're the oppressed peons. "You start planting this corn," I tell one, pointing to one end of the garden, "and you can make hills for pumpkins," I say, marking off another patch. They sigh and get to work.

My husband cheerfully rototilled a monstrous-sized garden plot against the fence between ours and the neighbor's yard last weekend. I can't help but notice that since he's gotten a rototiller there's a lot more garden than there was when he just had a shovel and his back to make a plot with.

The soil is cool and dry and sandy. My youngest son is carefully shaping little mountains, using the yard stick to determine the proper radius of each mound before he begins and then plunging it through the center after he's done to make sure that each is 9 inches tall. He's the meticulous one. The other son is making what can only be described as organic looking furrows for corn, having obviously decided that stakes and string are for losers. I figure that the corn will come up anyway, straight or crooked furrowing aside, and I praise his artistic way with a line as well as the other child's masterful engineering abilities.

About this time of year in Ludington I would be busily talking myself out of starting vegetables from seed. There would still be a threat of snow in the forecast or an ice storm, and I'd be hoping the crocuses and hyacinths in the back yard would survive it. My tulips would be thinking about poking their heads out of the ground in another month, but I'd be out there every day anyway looking for signs of incipient blooming.

Here in Jacksonville, planting season starts in March, with none of the desperate longing for green shoots that presages springtime in Michigan. You go from hot weather where everything is wilted to watery weather where everything has molded to cooler weather where everything is dulled to warm weather where everything has suddenly sprouted. No dark depressing time in weather or in attitude from which to recover. Spring happens regardless of the fact that I haven't suffered through bone shattering cold and consequently don't feel that I've done anything to deserve such a beautiful season.

Yesterday I took the daffodil bulbs that my neighbor gave me way back in January out of the vegetable bin in the fridge and put them in pots on the patio. It seems like cheating, shocking them like that. My neighbor, more used to the seasons down here, is already enjoying yellow daffodil blooms. My bulbs got tired of waiting for me to remember them and sprouted in the shopping bag I'd wrapped them in, tucked away behind the carrots and broccoli.

The boys and I manage to get two kinds of corn and twelve hills of pumpkins and squash planted before we call it quits for the day. They're cheerful going back to the house, as well as filthy. Amazing what a little grubbing in the dirt will do for even the most sullen teenager. There is more garden to plant on the south side of the house and another patch on the north side that's due to get gourds and cukes and flowers. We'll finish it up later in the week. Barring any more unauthorized rototillage by my husband, we should have everything in the ground by end of the month.

I listen as my sons congratulate themselves. Gardening isn't so bad. They can see light at the end of the tunnel. This, of course, is where they're completely wrong. I set chocolate shakes down in front of them to reward them for their good behavior like it says in my book and then I go research cookie recipes for next week, when we have to start weeding.

Running down a dream

This morning I am sitting at the table on the patio at my home in Florida, waiting for my body to stop sweating so I can go inside. Sweat condenses into puddles wherever my body comes in contact with the chair or the table. I feel spongy, like I'm made of frogs. My legs feel like someone has been hitting them with ball peen hammers. Little uncontrollable muscle twitches run up and down my thighs. My face is flushed and I smell vaguely like vegetable soup. My husband came out a little earlier to give me a hug and then noticed the steam wafting off me and recoiled. "You've been running," he said.

Last week, after stepping on the scale in the bathroom, a combination of hope and dread in my heart (doesn't regretfulness use up any calories at all?), I came to the inescapable conclusion that I was never ever going to be the kind of person who is satisfied with a half cup of anything and so I started running again.

I had successfully quit running almost two years ago after we'd first moved here. I had lots of good reasons for stopping. It was too hot, there wasn't any good place to do it that didn't require driving to get there, and my feet hurt. Since then I've resigned myself to the heat (it's only jungle hot three months out of the year) as well as the lack of running trails (there are probably venomous snakes sunning themselves around every turn anyway) and found a foot doctor (funny how a really expensive pair of inserts can fix so much that is wrong with a person).

So I've officially rejoined the mouth-breathers on the side of the road, dodging traffic, school kids and stray dogs every morning. My own dog comes with me, and should she provide the wherewithal, I carry, in addition to my radio and headset, a bag of warm poop. Sometimes I like to imagine how it could become a useful slinging weapon should some felon decide I was worth an assault. (Here, you knave! Take this!)

Running is a way to reduce stress, or at least re-direct it. The constant panic that I feel when I run (I can't possibly be getting enough air to keep this up past the next segment on "All Things Considered") leaves no room in my head for other worries (what if my legs fall off before I make it back home?).

Running focuses my mind on what's really important. I don't care anymore about what my neighbors think of the outfit in which I've chosen to appear in public (baggy black sweatpants with artistic bleach spots on them and a t-shirt that's been washed so many times it's practically transparent) because all I want to do is get done running as quickly as I can in order to get the whole soggy mess off and camp under a cold shower.

Running is paradoxical. While it's the quickest way to get my required minimum daily exercise over with, it feels like it takes forever to accomplish. I set and re-set goals for myself every fifty feet (I'll walk when I get to the next driveway. Maybe when I reach the next beer can. I'll walk now).

Running is something that my body does with or without my brain's consent. There were times when I was sure I'd talked myself out of going for a run (It's too cold; it's too hot; it's too early; it's too late; I think I might be sick; I'll run twice as long tomorrow), only to find myself jogging along the side of the road once again and not really remembering how I came to be there. (So obviously, running also brings on short term memory loss. Probably this is a minus.)

Best of all, running means I can eat as much as I want whenever I want (choose between buttered popcorn or potato chips with sour cream? Heck no, I'm having both!) as long as I don't care what it is, since by the time I finish running I'm too hot and smelly to go to the store and get anything really good (I guess I'll finish up that bag of wrinkled carrots in the vegetable bin and pretend that they're cheese puffs).

Last night I dreamed that I was running through the woods. My legs felt strong, my breathing was slow and even, my feet gobbled up the ground, nimbly skipping over the path. I felt as though I could go on forever, never tiring. When I awoke I put on my shoes and my sweatpants and my hoodie. I grabbed my radio and my dog and went running.

It was hard. I had to stop and walk every other block to catch my breath. My legs were heavy and slow and it took forever to get back home. Sweat dripped off the ends of my hair, down my back and the sides of my face. It all felt familiar and absolutely wonderful. The best part is, there's a big barrel of cheese puffs with my name on it waiting for me in the kitchen.

Morning Ritual

I make it last as long as I can.
One mouthful, set the cup down.
Another mouthful, feel how much cooler it's gotten since the last one!
A final mouthful and I'm staring at the blank white innards of my mug,
unbelieving.
23.5 hours to go before I can have another.
Damn.
It wasn't even good coffee.

Rock and Load

It's Saturday morning and I'm listening to my son doing color commentary on the state of the refrigerator.

"This is disgusting. Yuck. Who put this in here?"

He marches out of the kitchen and thrusts a half empty can of green chilis toward me.

"Mom, are we saving this?"

I don't want to crush my child's newly found zeal for search and destroy style housekeeping, but I happen to know that my husband put this can of chilis in the fridge, doubtless planning to use it for some culinary masterpiece in the near future. If I tell my son to throw it away, my husband might be annoyed. I weigh my husband's probable future irritation with my son's overwhelming need to use the bulldozer approach to cleaning the refrigerator, i.e., everything not nailed down gets pushed into the nearest garbage can, resulting in an appliance that is sparkly clean, fresh smelling, and above all, emptier than when you started.

I recall feeling exactly this way a long time ago, just prior to our move from Grand Rapids to Ludington, except that it was a house I was emptying instead of a refrigerator. I'd been upstairs cleaning the attic and stumbled across a large sack in one corner. Inside the sack were rough pieces of alabaster, pink and white and gray-veined, ranging from a few as small as a baseball to some as big as a loaf of bread.

Maybe it had something to do with being hot and dusty from hours of clearing the detritus that had accumulated after twelve years of cohabitative bliss, maybe it was because I knew that I'd only scratched the surface of what still needed to be organized, maybe it was because I distinctly recalled having moved this same sack of rocks at least three times in the last seven years, but right then I knew I'd never hated anything as much as I hated those rocks.

It didn't matter anymore that I and my husband had driven six hours to collect these very stones, sacrificing an entire afternoon to climb around on quarry piles in the hot sun, determined to find the perfect raw material for sculpting candle holders, incense burners and miniature busts.

That day in the attic I had exactly 72 hours before I had to pile everything we owned into a 24-foot truck. The contents of that sack were no longer potential art projects, they were a bag of rocks that weighed about thirty pounds and they represented everything I hated about moving.

I hated having to organize and pack up our stuff in order to move it when it was only going to get unpacked and disorganized the moment we reached our destination. I hated making choices about what had to go or stay and I particularly hated making choices about someone else's belongings, which these rocks technically were. They weren't just my rocks. They were my husband's rocks, too.

That's why I decided to do what I did. After all, he was already at the new place, possibly working hard and not having to pack up the old house. I was resentful about the whole arrangement. Also I was getting help loading the U-Haul from my brother and already was having a hard time justifying the bajillion books that were coming with us. ("Don't they have books in Ludington?") How could I possibly explain a bag of rocks? ("Marie, did you know that this sack has rocks in it?" "Yes." "Don't they have rocks in Ludington?")

Decision made, I crashed the sack down three flights of stairs and dragged it to the curb for the garbage men to take away in the morning. If I didn't accomplish anything else that day it was fine, because the bag of rocks was gone and that was four square feet of misery I wouldn't have to cram on the truck.

The next day on the phone, my husband asked me if I'd remembered to pack a certain bag of rocks. Naturally I told him that I had no idea where they were. Thinking about it fifteen years later, I'm sure I'd throw them away and lie about it again, no problem.

Now my son stands in front of me with can in hand. He's transferred his irritation with me for giving him this particular chore to the refrigerator itself and his body is stiff with that air of righteousness that's so conducive to a good cleaning session. I know exactly how he feels.

"Go ahead and pitch it," I say. "I'll think of something to tell your dad."

What I've learned (since yesterday)

Living on a budget is a lot harder than I thought it would be and even though the little budget monitor in Quicken with the colored bars says I've overspent in six categories with two weeks left in January, I'm in the yellow in six more and green in the other twenty so it's all right.

My herbal tea tastes a lot better with lemon in it and it's worth $3.99 a bag to have the lemons in the house so I can drink it that way.

My family prefers to talk my ear off at the end of the day when I'm flat on my back in bed and hovering between guilty attentiveness and desperately sought after oblivion.

Some days my boys are perfectly ready to sit at the table and study math or listen to French tapes but other days they only settle down once they've been outside and beaten each other over the head with foam wrapped pvc pipes.

Darning a sock using six different colors of embroidery floss is a lot more satisfying than using just plain white. Sometimes I wish the holes were on the tops of my socks so I could more readily admire my patch jobs.

Doing embroidery is the best way to watch a scary movie because I'm so concentrated on what I'm doing that I can't see the graphic torture scenes that seem to be prominently featured in every dvd we get the the library lately and which will haunt me until the day I die.

The mail does get delivered on Martin Luther King Jr.'s actual birthday so this year my quarterly tax payment for January 15 will be one day late.

I don't need to print out my favorite color palette to use for a reference because it's in my head.

Drying sheets on a clothes line in the sun beats tumble drying every single time even if it takes two days on account of rain.

When I call my mother and there's an awkward silence in the middle of our conversation it's because she's holding the phone away from her ear and she can't tell that I've stopped talking.

I can sit on the couch for three hours at a time watching a football game between two teams that I couldn't care less about.

Sometimes when a child gets up in the middle of the night it's not because he's in agony from a muscle cramp or having an asthma attack or sleepwalking but just because he needs to use the bathroom.

As long as my son wants me to stop whatever I'm doing to come admire his computer animation project I will do it, even if I don't share his same fascination for mechanical killing machines and stick men.

Popcorn with butter and salt and Parmesan cheese will never take the place of Lay's Potato Chips with sour cream but it's pretty close.

The little signs indicating the changing seasons in northern Florida include: lizards and window frogs disappearing sometime around Christmas; red maples putting out new leaves at New Year's; seed packets going on sale at Walgreen's ten for a dollar two weeks before the Super Bowl.

Driving like a jerk just happens when you're in an SUV. When I drive my Natural Disaster other drivers slam on their brakes anticipating that I'll cut them off, so I usually do because when everyone is going 80 mph it's not a good idea to be messing with people's expectations.

Transformations

She's a lot younger in the mornings
before we begin the walk.
Her body is a coiled spring
the leash a live squirrel in her mouth.
She shakes and waggles and bounces.
Then we pass through the gate
and she's all business,
sniffing, peeing, heeling.
By the time we turn the last corner
she's acting her age,
doggedly making her way back
to food, water,
and the soft spot on the couch.

Making friends

I've begun to feel more at home here in the south and I think it's because I've finally made some new friends. I still have all my old friends back in Michigan, still write to them as often as I can, still plan on visiting when I make it back north, but there's nothing like having a girlfriend available for a cup of coffee and a good talk every now and then. That had been missing until just recently.

It was hard after we moved. I wasn't quite prepared for how isolated it would feel to be plopped down 1800 miles away from everything I knew. A friend who recently relocated from Colorado to Arizona said it was like "moving to Mars," and it was. I thought a little thing like a two-day drive wouldn't be such a big deal. I could always send pictures via email or chat with people online. And there was a Wal-mart on every corner down here, just like everywhere else. But it was weird. People talked differently. I had to keep asking my neighbor to repeat herself, tried faking comprehension a couple of times and then one day I broke down and asked her what some of her phrases actually meant. She didn't know either.

I recognized that I was lonely and, remembering what I had done when I first moved to Ludington, I called the Jacksonville Chamber and was shocked to discover that it was going to be a lot more expensive to become one with the local business community than it had been in my old home town. Truthfully, half the fun of going to the meetings in Ludington was sitting at a table with someone you knew. It was never about networking, unless you counted yakking with friends as networking.

In desperation I joined a health club. This worked a little better. At least I was around women for an hour a day. Unfortunately, we spent so much effort trying to hear the authoritative voice from the speakers telling us when to change stations that there was very little concentration left over for plain old girl talk.

I started to wonder if I wasn't doomed to be friendless in Florida. Maybe I'd already used up my quota for friends according to some universal scorecard. Maybe I just sucked as a friend and it was obvious to everyone but me. Or maybe I was just out of practice at finding friends. It had been a while since I'd had to start from scratch.

I thought about the first friend I ever had, a girl in kindergarten who drew square-butted horses with curly tails and Egyptian eyes. I began to draw horses like hers and that made us friends until someone stole my friend's affections by adding bows and ribbons to her own horse drawings. I could've drawn bows and ribbons too, but it wasn't something that made any sense to me as an artist. How did the ribbon get there? Horses can't put ribbons in their own manes. Where's the person putting in the bow and how would you draw him or her? While I was trying to figure out the repercussions of tail and mane adornment, my friend drifted away from me. The obvious lesson here was that friendship was fleeting, something I already knew. Or maybe it was that sometimes you just have to accept people as they are and not expect them to always make sense.

But lately things are looking up on the friendship front. I joined a homeschooling group back in August so once a week I'm surrounded by people as crazy about their children as I am about mine. I also have nodding acquaintances who I see nearly every day when I'm walking my dog. Admittedly I know more of the dogs' names than the humans who are with them, but we wave companionably to each other while determinedly keeping our animals on our own side of the street.

This past September I met a woman who has similar interests as me. She's homeschooling a daughter about my youngest son's age, and she likes to write but wishes she had more time to do it. Last month she passed along the location of a really great thrift store. I knew then that we were destined to become close. You know you have someone's trust when they declare out loud that old jewelry is the only kind worth wearing, that the pretty towel and candle holder in their kitchen used to be a gun rack, and that they're a sucker for sequined sweater sets for $4.99.

This new friend and I meet every full moon now for a "Beach Session" at a local park south of town. We bring folding chairs and hot tea and the latest updates on our children and husbands. The updating part can last several hours. Then we take out our flashlights and we read each other something we've written ourselves. It's my favorite part of the night, sharing a creative effort with a kindred spirit to the sound of the surf in front of us. I think about how the moon over our heads is shining on Ludington, too, and then home doesn't feel so far away. It's right here, with my friend.

Handmade is best, hands down

Made water bottle cozies for the kids and my husband for Christmas this year out of recycled wool sweaters and Sculpey clay. I think the animals and skulls are my favorites. I had mushrooms for the green one but at the last minute decided to save them for another project. I have so many.

Art has gone to the dogs

Started another pastel picture (can't seem to call it a painting, maybe because it's not wet!) for a friend. I have another one in the works. Still mean to finish the Ms. Rushmore piece and then I want to begin on another portrait of Sue with her daughters. I don't have any skills to speak of with this medium, but playing with the colors has sure been a lot of fun! Here's Rascal in four pictures so far.

Art 4 Love

Here's where I'm going to leave it for a few days. I'm not sure what I want to do with it now. I either like the background or I want to change it. I can't decide what to do with the faces. So I'm going to do nothing for a while and see where that takes me. This is going on the wall where I'll see it in passing. Sometimes looking at a thing out the side of your eye can help when staring it dead on doesn't.

And this is what I started with this morning:

Art 4 Love

So, I started over AGAIN, because the last version was just too dark and creepy for me. Plus, I tried this underpainting technique and it wasn't until I started putting flesh tones over the top of the purple that I really got it, figured out what it was supposed to accomplish and then I was like, OH. So I wanted to try it again except in a purposeful way instead of an accidental one.

It's coming along pretty well, I think. I hope to finish it today sometime. I'm definitely enjoying the process, trying not to work too hard on just one area before heading out to the next. Definitely going to want to do more of this. Any requests?

Art 4 Love

I got some more work done on this early. I learned that I have to put in the dark stuff first so I did some of that and now the process makes more sense to me. Definitely need more practice working on faces. It's hard not to overlay personality on there at the same time as the color, but I'll figure it out, or try again.

Art 4 Love

Progress, of a sort. I took my friend Cherryl's suggestion to add another friend to the pile. My husband walked through this morning and thought it looked like Mt. Rushmore, so I've officially named it "Ms. Rushmore." More work to do, but it's starting to get interesting.

Brick layers

Last weekend I watched as my husband pulled up chain link fence posts from around our house. There were nine posts that needed to come out, each one with a twenty pound slug of cement around the bottom. I felt for him, but I have too much respect for my back to have offered to help. Earlier he'd found a black snake under a piece of old linoleum in the corner by the house. The snake must've been cold because it waited there while he went inside to get his camera and snap a hundred pictures of it before finally slithering off somewhere. The snake was the other reason I wasn't out there.

We're working on putting in a patio right outside the back door. I've been dreaming of one since we moved here. We hadn't done much about it before this for two good reasons: we weren't sure what kind of patio we wanted to install and we didn't have any money to put one in anyway.

Last week we eliminated both obstacles when we found the bricks for our project in a nearby roadbed that the city is in the process of widening and repaving. Underneath layers of concrete and asphalt was a nine foot wide swath of bricks, laid down sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, part of a road that goes through Jacksonville south to St. Augustine and beyond.

Some of the bricks have diamonds molded into the tops. Some say Graves B'ham Ala on them, some say Southern Clay Mfg Co. Some don't say anything at all. The colors range from deep red to yellowish to orange. A few are chipped, most are intact, some look as though they were taken out of the mold before they'd quite set up and laid across a curved surface to cool. These warped ones are my favorites.

By the time we were through hauling we had about a thousand bricks. A guy we met while grubbing around in the dirt told us that each brick weighs about ten pounds. It made me feel a whole lot tireder to know this. It made my youngest son feel a whole lot stronger. He started hefting them two at a time after that.

There were quite a few people out there digging in the roadbed besides us. One guy, Mike, was loading about sixty bricks at a time into his little white sports car. He was rueful about it. "My buddy was supposed to come with his truck," he said. Mike told us his wife was not crazy about all the bricks he'd been bringing home and stacking around his house. This was in sharp contrast to my husband's wife, me, who not only approved of free bricks but was actually helping to lever them out. For the record, I only accompanied my husband on eight trips. He and the boys did the rest on their own. I'm a cheapskate, but I'm a cheapskate with a bad back. See above.

Some people were collecting them to sell. I found an e-bay listing with links to information about the Old Brick Road and the Dixie Highway. Vitreous bricks were considered a big step up from the sea shells and sand normally used for road surfacing and Jacksonville alone had seven miles of brick road. My two boys were more interested in what the seller was getting for them, which was a buck and a quarter each, in lots of 250, delivery extra.

Once we had the bricks we started wondering about where we could get the sand to cement the things when they were all laid out. My husband suggested Lowe's but I thought, why spoil a perfectly free patio project by buying dirt for it?

So my first idea was to dig a hole in the yard, since Florida is basically a big sandbox floating on the ocean. "Didn't you want a koi pond?" I asked my husband hopefully, but he said he was just thinking about something small and trough-like, and nothing as big as we'd need to get enough sand to fill in all the cracks between the bricks, as well as a two inch layer over the pea gravel.

Then I remembered the drainage ditch out behind the house. There's a shoulder along it just behind our fence that's a favorite all terrain path for the local teenagers and their grandparents' golf carts. If we dug our hole there and covered it up with palm fronds we could get all the free sand we'd ever need as well as put an end to off road golf carting. My husband agreed with all of this plan except the part where I trap my neighbors' children in a pit and so sometime this week I expect to put my sons to work hauling dirt and sifting it in their free time.

The downside to free bricks is that it's pretty labor intensive. Recently I took a rock hammer and chipped old asphalt off bricks for a couple hours. If the boys and I do fifty a day for the next twenty days they'll be all cleaned up and ready to lay down in a few weeks. By the time I've gone through them all I'll feel as though I know them personally.

I'm looking forward (probably pretty far forward) to sitting out on the patio in the morning, sipping my coffee and imagining the sounds of horses' hooves clippety clopping over those bricks, seeing in my mind old Model T's with families out for a drive, clattering over the same stretch of road years later. It would have been a lot different back then. Not nearly as many people. There would have been a lot more trees and shade and the smell of swamp just about everywhere.

Now that we have all the bricks we need I'm anxious to finish our patio. The bricks are patient, however. They've waited a hundred years to be found by us. Another week or two won't matter. It's me that can hardly wait.

Art 4 Love

This is going to be a series of creative endeavors that I'll complete for love and not money. I do enough of the other already.

My first official project is a pastel painting of me and two friends, Cherryl and Dorothy, giggling after lunch (or was it before lunch?). Here's the first picture. More to come.

Company's coming! (Now is the perfect time to panic!)

I'm expecting company next week so, true to form, I'm now seeing my house through panic-colored glasses. All those things that I meant to get to someday have now become a lot more urgent. Nothing in my house looks the same as it did before I knew I was going to be entertaining and my brain has been writing post-it notes to itself. (Remind boys to pull out those two rusty posts by the front steps. Lay new tile in the bathroom floor.)

I love company, really I do. Since we've moved we're a lot farther away from most of our friends and relatives so having people over is a rare treat. I especially like sitting with everybody at our dining room table, looking through boxes of photos, drinking a cup of coffee and eating something sweet. (Remember to pick up something sweet at the bakery section in the grocery store. Or maybe make raised cinnamon rolls. Do I even own yeast?)

Last time we had a visitor it was a teenager from France and she stayed with us for six weeks. I re-grouted my bathroom shower in her honor, not that she noticed. I mean, she was a teenager. (Re-paint both bathrooms? Or would it be faster to wallpaper?)

I work myself up into this housekeeping tizzy a whole week before everyone's due to show up, cleaning things that I'd never bother to clean otherwise, like under my refrigerator, and organizing things that nobody will ever see, like storage closets and filing cabinets. (Vacuum out all the window sills in the house. Where did all those dead bugs come from?)

Pretty soon I'm snapping at my children to clean their rooms and snarling at my husband to organize the tool shed. Don't they realize how essential it is that our house be perfect in every way before company comes? (Should I go buy a "Bed in a Bag" at K-mart or see if I can find a complete sheet/bedspread/dust ruffle set that's hole-free and actually fits the bed in the guest room?)

Besides the usual housekeeping chores I occasionally catch myself contemplating a whole house makeover or a new landscaping project. (Maybe I can get my neighbor to come pour a cement patio in the back tomorrow. That'll give me a week while it sets up to go buy a table and chairs and maybe find a swordfish on a plaque to jazz it up a little.)

Underneath my panicked outer self I realize how dumb I'm being. I know that the reason people visit is because they want to spend time with us and not because they want to critique my housekeeping and decorating skills. (Order cable for the week that they're here? Or stick with seven channels and adjusting the antenna every time you change stations?)

The outcome to all this frenzied preparation is always the same. I basically chase my own tail right up until the last 24 hours before my company arrives. That's when I abandon all hope of achieving the perfect Better Homes & Gardens House and settle for the Disinfected Domicile instead. At the last moment I race through the house, spritz all available surfaces with bleach and throw all the clutter into the nearest closet. In the end, it's a relief to run out of time for anything but the bare minimum. (Get more bleach. Build more closets.)

My daughter says if I entertained more I wouldn't be as prone to freaking out prior to a visit. I think she's right, but my pool of available dinner party guests is kind of thin right now. I need to be more like Elwood P. Dowd in the movie "Harvey" and start inviting more people over to my house. Elwood never worried about what his house looked like. He just enjoyed talking to people. Besides, he had his sister to keep things up for him. Now that I think of it I can completely understand why she seemed so on edge all the time. It was the thought of all that company coming. (Invite more friends and family to Florida.)

Welcome to Gator Country

Garage sale season has started. It's the weather. Once the heat breaks, the little white cardboard signs come out, and all you have to do is drive up the street to find a little something that you didn't know you needed until you saw it in someone's yard under a sign marked, "Everything on this blanket - half off!"

Last Saturday we found a neighborhood sale down a cul de sac on a small lake. One couple was selling the man's extensive collection of hand tools ("Can't see good enough to use 'em") and if you bought something his wife would throw in absolutely free your choice of allen wrenches from a box of about a hundred. My husband bought a grinder from the man for twenty dollars. He showed it to our neighbor who promptly told him he could have gotten a brand new one for half the price. It might have come to blows soon after but then our neighbor wisely decided it was a better model than what he'd first thought so they're still speaking to each other.

While we were out bargain hunting we met a woman who had pictures of her sons and husband standing next to an eight foot alligator (strung up under a tree and presumably dead) and also of her 18 month old grandson perched on the alligator's back (cut down from the tree and definitely dead). The one of her grandson reminded me of a picture of my brother as a child, posed on a pony, except that in his case the pony merely looked bored and not dead at all.

The woman was very proud of the pictures and was carrying them from house to house showing them to everyone she met. This is clearly something that people do down here, pose next to alligators. My neighbor has shown me a picture of him and his cousins and his uncle, standing next to not just one, but two dead alligators. I noticed that everyone that the woman showed the pictures to seemed admiring and matter of fact about it.

To me, alligators are an alien life form that's best viewed from a distance, say behind a 2 inch plate glass window at a zoo or aquarium. It makes me go all squirmy inside to think about putting a toddler on an alligator's back and taking a picture of the occasion, I don't care how dead it is. Or maybe it's because it's dead that it's so disturbing, except that if it had been alive I'm pretty sure that would have been worse.

I didn't ask the woman with the pictures where her husband and sons had shot the alligator. I didn't ask her whether her family would be eating any part of it or whether they would have it stuffed and mounted or whether they would take the skin and make shoes and purses from it. I realize now I missed an opportunity to learn something more about the culture where I live.

But at the time, I was speechless with shock. For one, in Michigan, when people show you pictures of their grandkids they're usually posed in front of fake autumn scenes with colorful silk leaves artfully scattered around the foreground and a backdrop of split rail fencing with maybe a cute woodland creature, like a squirrel or chipmunk, perched on top. There are no dead reptiles anywhere in the picture.

I've never been one for staged family photos myself. It could be this is just a new trend and I'm out of the loop. Maybe the next new thing in family photography is dead bears or wolves or badgers with all the kids dressed in their Sunday best and parked on the carcass. It's nothing I'd want framed and hanging in the living room, but you never know. Different people have different ideas about what's attractive in a family portrait.

For two, I'm just not used to thinking of alligators as something you hunt and then pose beside. Deer? Sure. Bear? Absolutely. Rabbits? Got a couple pictures of those.

I'll know next time how to react. I figure it's bound to happen again. According to the Florida Fish & Wildlife website there are a million alligators in Florida. Every week in the paper there's a story about some poor sod losing an arm or a leg to an alligator. Granted, the sod in question is usually high as a kite and swimming in gator infested swamp at four in the morning, so it seems as though if you take the minimum precautions, i.e., stay sober and don't go swimming in alligator bogs at night, chances are good you won't be eaten by an alligator or probably even nibbled on very much.

The signs warning you not to feed them are at boat landings at every state park we've visited so far. It definitely makes you cautious about letting your dog off the leash to get a drink. (Quick! How do you call an alligator? Here, Fido!) I took a picture last month of my husband holding our dog on a leash while she quenched her thirst at the Bulow River State Park. He's scanning the river and so are my two boys standing on the dock by the landing. The dog is the only one in the shot not worried about becoming alligator snack food. It's probably the closest I'll get to having a family portrait with an alligator in it, even if it's only the idea of an alligator that's in the picture and not the real, live dead one, like other people have. I think I'll have it framed.

Having a wonderful time. Wish I was there.

I vacationed in Ludington this past summer. It was great to walk to the lighthouse, visit favorite restaurants and just pretend for a week that I lived in a small town again. I found myself falling into old habits like talking to people I didn't know and consequently made a friend of the woman working at the laundromat. I know she's my friend because she asked me to hold the fort while she took off in her car to run some errands. People don't do that in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I live now.

It's been a year since I moved to the south and I'm getting used to it here, but there are lots of things I miss about Ludington.

I miss walking in the woods and not worrying about what could possibly land on my head and bite me. Here there are banana spiders that grow all year round. A particularly impressive specimen used to be by the gate to the back yard. It was nerve wracking to walk past something the size of your hand with eight long legs on it, but it's funny how you miss things after they're gone. Something ate it last night and all that's left are the legs. The web is still intact. So I'm thinking it had to be another spider that did it, and it's gotta be bigger than my head. At least, now it is.

I miss swimming in fresh water. Admittedly, you can only do that five days of the year in Lake Michigan without getting hypothermia, but at least it doesn't make you sticky afterward and there's absolutely nothing in there that will eat you. Here the ocean is warm from April until December, but there are a few caveats. You have to stay away from river mouths during spawning season because those are favorite hunting grounds for sharks and if you see jellyfish on the shore, it's a clear indicator that they're in the water, too. Some kind person walking along the beach told me that if you peed on the part of your body where you got a jellyfish sting it would stop hurting. This is good to know since it will make it less embarrassing when I lose control of myself from the pain when I do get stung. I can just say I was applying first aid.

I miss four seasons. There are no seasons here. Well, okay, there are, but they name them differently. Instead of winter, fall, spring and summer, it's hot, damn hot, jungle hot, and Africa hot.

I miss Ludington-scaled things, like the distance to downtown. In Ludington, downtown was three blocks away. Here, it's a half hour drive, then another twenty minutes to find a place to park, then a brisk ten minute walk across a parking lot that's the temperature of the surface of the sun to get to your final destination.

I miss going to the store and having six or eight people I know stop and say hello to me. Here, I go to the same two grocery stores twice a week and the cashiers ask me for my ID every single time. Even I'm beginning to doubt I am who I say I am.

I miss throwing my children outdoors to play. In Ludington I did this three times a day. They didn't always go, but I made the attempt anyway. Here I don't have the heart to do it. For one, right now it's Africa hot out there and for two, there are snakes. My husband keeps finding these four foot long snake skins outside in the yard. If I stopped admiring them do you think he'd stop bringing them to show to me? Last weekend I added quarter round molding to the regular molding in the bedrooms, just as an added barrier. You never know. Maybe snakes like to get out of the heat, too.

Most of all I miss my friends. The best part of our trip was seeing everyone and catching up. Email is nice but it's no substitute for sitting in the Brewpub or Chef John's and cackling loudly enough that the people at the table next to you want in on the joke.

I'm planning to visit Ludington again next year, but this time for two weeks instead of just one. That'll give me time to squeeze in a few more conversations, another beautiful sunset or two and maybe even an extra shift at the laundromat.

Cat study

Let the cat out this morning.

She peers as me, trying to figure out what I am. I reach out and cup her small head in my hand, stroke her back, all the way to her tail, surprised at the softness, and guess that my daughter took a brush to her the night before. She begins to purr.

She's wobbly on her feet, back legs collapsing with every step. Still, she twitches her tail and wanders off around the corner of the house, looking for something interesting to play with. Which is funny, considering that she's probably completely blind.

She's a study for all old people on the verge of death. A while ago I started buying canned cat food on the advice of the veterinarian. He thought she'd appreciate having something soft to eat. Then I made the mistake of changing the brand of soft food on her and she up and quit eating all together. For a couple of days she dwindled, until I figured it out. She wasn't sick, she just didn't recognize the other stuff as food, or at least, it wasn't HER food. So I replaced the new stuff with the old stuff and she went right back to lapping it up, as though she was starving, which, of course, she was.

I felt bad afterwards, that it took me so long to notice.

We've had her with us for a long, long time. Now and again we amuse ourselves trying to decide how old she is. 20? 22? 25? Old, anyway. She was around before the kids, I know this, because I remember being very sensitive to the smell of the cat food I used to have to feed them. This was before she was an only cat and one of two. The other cat, Nancy, caught some infection from her cheap cat food and thereafter, they both had to go on an expensive cat food diet, which used to give me nausea when I was pregnant. I couldn't even have the cats in the same room with me because the smell of the cat food permeated their whole bodies. I remember chasing them out of the living room. Eventually they learned to avoid me.

After I had my daughter it wasn't so bad, but by then I had other responsibilities and so there was no time for playing with cats anyway.

Now I only have the one cat left and she's not long for this world. Of course, we've written her off a few times before this and she always comes back. Once, shortly after we'd moved here she disappeared out the back door and didn't come home for days. I thought she'd been killed for sure, by an owl maybe or hit by a car. I thought someone else had taken her into their home. That was what I told the kids.

The day that I decided to clean up the litterbox for the last time and dump it in the trash was the day that she wandered back home, none the worse for her adventure. Then I knew what had happened. She'd stayed with someone else, but they didn't know the trick of living with her and could only put up with her midnight howling for a few days before they turned the gift cat loose again. She came home and we went back to our routine of buying her wet food ("How many days do you think she'll live? 6 cans? 8 cans?") and scooping her box and locking her in the back room before retiring so that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, howling because she can't remember where she is, we don't hear her at all.

Snakes

Today I plan to look out the bathroom window at the concrete steps to nowhere and see if the snake the bug man told me about is napping there in the sun. He said it was about a yard long and showed me by spreading his hands apart and then he said, "It's just a regular garden snake." He said he saw another one poke its head up out of the hole in the steps when he came out of the crawl space underneath the house. "I saw a rodent nest down in the crawl space but it looked pretty old. Probably the snakes have cleaned them out," he said. I called my husband to tell him about the snakes. I knew he'd be tickled.

I thought my sons would like to know about them, too, except I predicted Sam would refuse to leave the house again for fear of getting bit. But he just said, "Black snakes? Those are the good kind," and let it go.

I took a picture of one of them from the bathroom window yesterday. Its head was up as though it was listening. I think if I'd tried to sneak up on it from the back door it probably would've been long gone by the time I got around the corner. When I looked at the picture in iPhoto it looked larger than I imagined and smaller, too.

Steve says that a woman at work, Linda, told him that if you try to corner a black snake it will sometimes shake the very tip of its tail in the leaves to simulate a rattlesnake's rattle to try to scare you off. Part of me wants to see and hear this and part of me is convinced that the snake will chase me.

I remember a story that my dad used to tell me about when he was a boy and he and some friends convinced a boy to take a whip like stick and snap it at a nest of dozing blue racer snakes. "They came right after him and he was running so fast to get away that he got clear across the creek without getting his feet wet!" said Dad, chuckling. I could see the sun coming through the bright green leaves and smell the warm dirt along the path when he'd tell that story. I could see the boys, barefoot at the creek and I could hear the way they talked and the casual setting up of a friend to go do something that probably wouldn't kill him but would definitely give him something to remember the day by.