Bath Time in the Ol' Stock Pot

Last night was the Halloween parade in our town. The local Jaycees sponsor it every year, and it has grown in popularity over the last 10 years from a hometown event to a regional happening. We have folks coming from 5 or 6 surrounding counties in the state and a few more from down in Maryland. Vendors arrive from the rest of Pennsylvania, from Maryland, New Jersey, maybe even New York. I usually stay home to avoid the crowds, but I thought this might be a good time to take Cone and Ball around for Halloween.


First, though, they needed baths. Cone has been run over a few times -- lots of tire marks -- and Lord only knows what that grey-green-brown stuff is on Ball. I used to have a galvanized washtub, but it rusted through, and I didn't want to put Cone in the bathtub. Thought one of my stockpots might work, so I squirted dishwashing soap in the bottom of it and hit that with the hard spray on the garden hose. In practically no time at all, it looked like the pot was full of whipped cream.

Cone is permanently marked, I'm afraid, but at least it's now a brighter orange than before. Ball was easier to clean, but harder to rinse -- kept rolling off the picnic table right back down in the dirt, until I got the canner rack and placed it in that. Perfect! A ball cage.

Once rinsed, they sat in the late afternoon sunshine to dry off. What a Mutt-and-Jeff pair they make.

Before long, Russell -- another plastic thing, only it isn't a cube -- decided to keep Cone company while it dried. Good thing Russell is plastic, or I might have had to bathe Cone again!

Time to go shopping for costumes!

[All photos (c) M. C. McLemore, October 2008]

Soup Day

The October winds are late this year, by a couple of weeks, but they have arrived with purpose and dogged determination. All those leaves I raked up last week (but didn't put in bags yet) have been blown helter-skelter all over the neighborhood. Yep, ol' Mike-the-Tree-Killer has been blessed with several hundred of them, plus fresh ones that hadn't fallen yet. Heh-heh-heh.

-

The weather changed suddenly last evening from being a "beautiful Seattle day" to weather more typical of November. The temperature dropped about 10 degrees in about as many minutes, the clouds settled downward and sprayed the neighborhood with needle-sharp raindrops, while the slight breeze changed direction and speed from northwesterly to northerly and from slight breeze to knock-you-hat-off.

-

I awoke this morning to a steady, heavy drizzle and wind gusts of 45-50 MPH. I absolutely love, love, LOVE days like this! I love the howl of the wind through the trees and the song the leaves make in it. I love the groans and moans the house makes when some of the gusts wrap around the chimney and tickle the shingles.

-

And aren't I lucky that the winds are here today, my day off. I can stay home and make soup!

-

When I can, I like to make soup from scratch, which means browning bones for broth, peeling and chopping as many of the vegetable ingredients as possible, and simmering the meat (if it's that kind of soup). I am a person of the senses: the aromas of roasting bones, then broth and seasonings; the sounds of simmering stock with wind accompaniment; the sight of the steam rising in a sinuous column to the ceiling; the feel of the vegetables in my hand followed by the action of cutting and chopping. I am, physically and sensually, fully engaged in the process.

-

Today's soup is vegetable-beef. It is made with the roasted-beef-bones broth, chili-ground bottom-round, onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, parsley, tomatoes, limas, corn, cabbage, green beans, crushed garlic, marjoram, chervil, bay leaves and one stinking petunia...no, no...I'm kidding...one parsnip. Vegetable soup isn't the same, to my taste buds, without parsnip. Turnip makes a good-enough substitute for parsnip, but it's stronger and sharper in flavor, and you really have to like turnip (I do) to put it in your soup.

-

I love to cook. Someday, I'll have a home that is mostly commercial grade kitchen with a small bedroom and bath off the back. The rest of it will be dining space for a couple hundred people. I will feed all my friends, family and kind strangers who come knocking at the door.

-

How will I do that, you ask, given that I am nearly broke all the time? I don't know, but God provided all those loaves and fishes, didn't She?

(Image courtesy [unasked] of http://www.galensgarden.co.uk/vegetables/images/parsnip.jpg)

The Dark Side of Pumpkinhood

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
These photos are by Dan Haskell.
http://www.geekus.org/

Some of the others on his website are even darker in mood. They remind me of Disney's "Night on Bald Mountain," in Fantasia. Oooooooooooooo!

I like these. The pictures send chills up and down my arms.

(Either that, or the furnace has kicked off for the night.)

[All photos this post are (c) Dan Haskell.]

YouTube Newbie

I have discovered YouTube! Actually, someone sent me something from his YouTube account and that's how I learned of it.

When I googled for Halloween stuff today (I was looking for a music file of '5 Little Pumpkins'), I came across some videos from YouTube. Kareema helped me set up an account and collect some of the Halloween related videos. Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/sofieonecrow
to see what I collected, if you like Halloween things. A couple of the videos have some things in them that young children probably ought not see (death of a happy little pumpkin, a flasher jack-o-lantern, something else I can't remember just now) but otherwise, they're entertaining.


Back to the collective noun for pumpkin-shaped candy buckets: how about 'a patch of pumpkin buckets?' Or, 'a squash of pumpkin buckets?'

Five Little Pumpkins

This is a song my daughter brought home from kindergarten 30-some-odd years ago. It probably is a counting song, and has some hand motions that go with it...which, remarkably, she still remembers.

Five little pumpkins

Sitting on a gate

The first one said,

"Oh, my, it's getting late!"

The second one said,

"There are witches in the air!"

The third one said,

"But we don't care!"

The fourth one said,

"Let's run and run and run!"

The fifth one said,

"I'm ready for some fun!"

Oooo-Ooooo, went the wind

And OUT went the light

And the five little pumpkins

Rolled out of sight!

**********************

-

-

We are fast approaching one of my favorite childhood events - Halloween. When I was a kid (and this tells you how old I am, even if I hadn't already mentioned it), we used old clothes from our parents' closets, or costumes made of crepe paper, or things my mom found at the thrift store. One year, my brothers Mac and Johnny got brand new Davy Crockett costumes, including the faux-coon-skin cap and plastic Bowie knife. I was a hobo again, for the third year in a row. Still, I always had a great time and got lots of loot, back when it was safe to eat everything in your bag without having to take it somewhere to be checked out first. We older kids sometimes had to share our loot with the little ones who were too young to go out, so it didn't all make it back to the house. Johnny learned the hard way not to hide chocolate candy in his underwear.

-

-

This year, my grandson is living at a residential treatment facility for kids with psychological disorders. He is autistic: Asperger's Syndrome. He's sixteen, but he is much younger emotionally and has difficulties fitting in with kids his own age. Although he is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum of disorders, his emotional problems (and the autism) require intensive therapy and treatment, more than his mother or I could provide for him at home.

-

-

-

He would love to go out trick-or-treating if he were home, so Kareema and I are fixing candy buckets for him and the other boys in his dorm. We went to Wally-World for goodies, and picked up a dozen plastic jack-o-lanterns, which I forgot and left in the back of my Jimmy. There is a lip on the edge of my carport which causes the car to bounce a little if I pull into it too fast, which I did when I came home from work yesterday. I was startled, briefly, to see flying orange pumpkins smiling at me in the rear view mirror when the car bounced up!

-

-

Okay...now, what do we call a collection of Halloween candy buckets?

-

[The nightmare of pumpkin buckets photo (c) M.C. McLemore, OCT 2008]

Collective Nouns

I tell you, I am so glad I'm alive in the age of Google! I love learning odd bits and pieces of information, things that might serve me well in word games but probably nowhere else...unless to make idle elevator conversation.


A few posts ago, I pondered what would be the collective noun for safety cones and went googling to try to find it. Well, lo! and behold! I found a collective noun for traffic/safety cones...can you believe it?!


Here's what I found on Wikipedia when I googled "collective nouns":

A confusion of [traffic] cones -suggested by Margaret Webb, j&m@arachnid.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.ojohaven.com/collectives


Except, in Cone's case, I think a 'misplacement of cones' might be better.

Here are some other collective names for things that I found amusing/interesting/confounding:

• a bask of crocodiles


• an ostentation of peacocks


• a sleuth of bears


• a quiver of cobras


• a rumba of rattlesnakes (Shake those maracas!)


• a train of coyotes


• a pipe of eels


• a romp of otters


• a pandemonium of parrots


• a bob of sea lions (presumably while in water?)


• a lump of toads


• a squirm of worms


• a shiver of sharks (understand that one completely!)


• an odor of skunks


• an overabundance of elephants


• a crash of rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?)

My favorite is "a rabble of butterflies." This definition is from en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rabble: A mob; collectively, commoners; a disorderly group.

So, as they're gathering at some puddle in the rain forest, a collection of Monarchs jostles the other insects out of the way, bellying up to the bar, as it were, obstreperous, rude and mischief-making:

"Hey, Davey, how's your Mom, eh? Still dating that glow-worm, is she?"

Davey throws a wing-slap in the offender's direction.

"Not like your Mom! At least mine knows who fathered her kids! Your sister looks like a maggot!"

With that, the brawl begins. The resultant chaotic flapping of thousands of butterfly wings starts a cascade of weather-altering effects. The eastern seaboard of the United States is hit with unheard of winter hurricanes and nor'easters that start the first day of deer season in Pennsylvania, lasting into April the following year.

That wouldn't have happened had the collective noun for butterflies been something less rabble-rousing, like "a consultation of butterflies," for instance.

[The rowdy rabble photo above (c) Michael Patrick. Found at media.knoxnews.com,
Knoxville (TN) News Sentinel.]

Raking Leaves, Part...I've Lost Count

Ball and Cone couldn't resist a gigantic pile of leaves anymore than I could when I was a kid. Heck! Who am I kidding? That's probably why I enjoy raking them up...for the big piles, and for the great childhood memories of jumping in them...and hiding in them to scare the pants off my Dad when he came home from work! (I got to do that one time only, but it was a good one! Sweet!)



Ball plays mighty rough for a little guy! Pushed Cone over like it was nothing. That's quite a feat, given that Ball weighs about a sixth of what Cone weighs, and Cone has such a heavy, wide base (I do, too, but mine is called a butt).


Cone found a feather while upside down in the leaves and decorated himself with it, like Yankee Doodle, only Cone has no hat and no pony. Great imagination, though!

Halloween is coming next week. Since my grandson is too old (and not here) to take out trick-or-treating, I might take Cone and Ball around the neighborhood.

Stay tuned, race fans, for the developing story.

Raking Leaves, Blah-blah-blah.

My property runs about 100 feet deep by about 40 feet wide, which means there is a magnificent abundance of leaves for the raking each year, unless the October winds get to them before I do, in which case they get blown into my across-the-alley neighbor's yard.

This no doubt pisses him off supremely, since he cut down all his trees several years ago so that he'd never have to rake another damned leaf for as long as he lived! (So he hoped, I'm sure.)

(He had the most glorious ginkgo in his back yard - glowed like new gold each fall; some ancient-looking, huge larches (favored by my crows for their height), plus a couple of maples and a dogwood...but, I digress - again.)

My yard is blessed with the leaves from two native persimmons, the biggest sassafras tree I've ever seen, a witch hazel, a service berry, a dogwood, an ironwood beech, a smoke tree, a Chinese chestnut, a southern wood or yellow heart tree (don't know - could be either or the same), four larches, an arbor vitae, an eastern cedar, a red oak, a paw-paw tree and a couple others I can't recall the names of at the moment. Plus a variety of deciduous shrubs. I am in leaf heaven each October.

The leaves in this picture (above) represent about 20% of my 'crop,' so I'm going to be a very happy raker for a couple more weeks.

I'm even willing to share with Mike, the tree killer, next door.

Raking Leaves, Part Two

I must be terribly dumb about blogging (a distinct probability), or there is no way to insert photos throughout the body of the post.

Not that this post (or these posts, as it's turning out to be) are all that important or useful or worthwhile. In fact, this is naught but a bit of silliness, which loses its impact when broken up into several blogs. There has to be a way around this. Grump!

Okay, then...on with it!

Raking Leaves, Part One

Great day to rake leaves; cool enough for a sweater, but not too cold. Bright, sunshiny day. Down the street, someone is mowing grass, maybe for the last time this season, though I doubt it. I usually have to cut grass well into November, sometimes as late as Thanksgiving week.





A couple of doors down in the other direction, a neighbor has fired up her fireplace for the first time this fall; smells like apple wood and oak burning.





I like to let the leaves stay on the ground as long as I can, to enjoy their fading colors and the smell of them as they dry in the sun. It's a balancing act, though, trying to guess how long is long enough without allowing the leaves to get moldy. Mold wreaks havoc with my asthma, the only drawback to the pleasure of raking.

So it goes.

[Shadow Crow photo (c)M.C. McLemore, OCT 2008]

Cone Has a Friend

Cone has found a friend. Its name is Ball. I don't know where Ball came from, but it was in the back yard when I went out to rake leaves today.


I've often thought that there's a cat grapevine, along which cats leave messages about which yards to steer clear of, where a homeless cat can find a free meal, which house has a crazy dog (or worse, a crazy old cat lady), where Spike the Slasher claims territory and stuff like that. Now I wonder if discarded plastic things have a grapevine, too.


And notice their shapes? Maybe the next stray will be a cube.

(Photo of Cone and Ball (C) M. C. McLemore, OCT 2008)

Credit Where Credit's Due

I cannot find the information for the photo in my profile, for which I apologize to the photographer. As soon as I do, however, I will post it.
-
The photo behind the title of this blog was taken by Brian Stormont.
http://mosttorn.blogspot.com/
-


The squawking crow, in this post just because I like it, is by Kevin and Jay McGowan.
-

I like crows.

Curly-Joe, Sister and Georgie

Curly-Joe (in the broken birdbath dish) is so named because the tip of his tail is kinked, though you can't see that in the picture. Sister (near the green mat) is so named because...well, she's their sister. Kareema calls her Princess, because she acts like one.

Georgie (the only one remaining) is so named because he is so blasted curious about everyhing! (Like the storybook character, "Curious George.")

I found them in the carport in a wooden box in late June. When their mother weaned them onto the birds and rabbits that call my yard home, I started feeding all of them to try to save the other wildlife. My crows aren't happy with the situation, but the smaller animals seem grateful. The crows want the cats to move away to someone else's yard.

As soon as I can find homes for the kittens, the crows will come back. They visit the larches and the oak tree in the yard everyday, keeping an eye on the cat situation, occasionally letting me have an earful about it.

Ah, well...what can I tell ya? I like wild things.

(Pictures of the kittens by Ken Jones, (C) October 2008)

The Traveling Cone

I have adopted a feral safety cone. It broke away from its littermates several blocks away and showed up at my side gate early one morning last week. I don't know how long it has been on its own, but it looks a little ragged and beat up, plus it could use a bath and a hot meal.

Okay, okay...it isn't feral and doesn't have littermates. (Which begs the question, though: what is the collective noun for a bunch of safety cones?) Our borough is doing work on the water lines and the local gas company is installing new meters in the same area. There are dozens of these cones scattered about for a three or four block radius near my house, and have been for about 6 weeks.

On her way home late one night about a month ago, my daughter Kareema found two of them in the middle of the street about a block from the house. Being the good citizen that she is, she stopped and picked one up and placed it on the curb, out of harm's way. (The other one wasn't in the middle of the street, plus the traffic light had changed and she had to move her car out of the way, or she would have picked the other one up, too.)

Anyway, last Wednesday morning, she noticed there was a cone lying on its side along the fence to my property. It was pitch dark when she left for work and she probably wouldn't have noticed it had it not been for the reflective stripes around the body of the cone. She called me to tell me it looked like the cone she rescued had made its way to my house, and wondered if I wanted to keep it.

Since I have three feral kittens (no, I really do) I'm trying to find a home for (they're almost tame by now; been feeding them), I was disinclined to take in another stray. Nevertheless, I put my fuzzy slippers on and went out to take a look at it.

Poor little thing was lying on its side, its nose pushed through an opening in the chain-link around the front yard. I set it out on the curb, thinking its owner would probably be looking for it, then went on to work, myself. When I returned home, there it sat, just where I had left it.

And there it sat until this morning. I felt sorry for it and brought it into the back yard. I am debating whether to bring it into the house. I don't know what they eat and I don't think the kittens would want to share their litter box.

I am trying to resist the urge to name it. 'Cause, once you name them, you can't get rid of them.

Just ask Georgie, Sister and Curly-Joe.

(photo of Conehead by M. C. McLemore, (C) October 2008)

Onions and Roses

(Written 9 September 2008)

I woke up old this morning.

-

I had aged twenty years overnight. I know the exact moment it happened, too, because it woke me up from a sound sleep; from a sound sleep and a beautiful dream.

Funny thing about dreams, at least mine, anyway. I am all ages at once, but no one specific age at any time. My childhood comes back to me with the rational understanding of an adult, yet I fly in my dreams with child-like glee and an unquestioning acceptance of the impossible. I can be anything and anyone I want to be in my dreams.

-

Except this morning, around five or so. That’s when reality intruded and I awoke with the gravity of my years pressing me back to earth.

“No,” I was correcting myself, speaking to my dream partner. “I am sixty-one!”

The shock of those words made me wake instantly and rise up to the side of my bed. I sat there unsteadily, trying to focus on the lamp on the nightstand. My eyes settled on the clock, near the lamp. “5:06,” it blinked at me.

You are old, my mind whispered.

-

I leaned toward the lamp to turn it on, and my wrist made a popping sound as it took the weight of my upper body. (I didn’t know we could pop our wrist bones the way we can pop our knuckles.)

Sadness swept over me, not so much from the unavoidable truth of the words I had spoken in the dream as from the loss of it.

I was being courted, in the most elegant and charming Old-World manner, by a man several years younger than I thought I was in my dream state. He reminded me of a young man I knew in my twenties, but looked different; more Mediterranean, less north-European. I think the dream had been developing for some time during the night, but the part I remembered clearly was the few moments before I awoke.

Our friendship was changing to love, and it seemed we had moved to the stage where it either deepens and you commit to one another, or you decide to remain close friends. He took me home to meet his parents and siblings, who welcomed me warmly, if with some reservation. His younger sister was teaching me the tango, to everyone’s amusement – especially mine.

Someone knocked at the backdoor, then joined the rest of us in the living room. My beloved introduced me to a former girlfriend of his, a drop-dead gorgeous woman in the Catherine Zeta Jones style of drop-dead gorgeous.

At that exact moment, I was wearing a bunch of freshly-pulled scallions atop my head, the green tops falling like loose curls across my forehead. (I didn’t have roses for my hair, you see, while learning the tango, so I had grabbed the bunch of onions and plopped them... you get the picture, I’m sure.)

To his credit, and maybe his upbringing, my dream beloved acted as though nothing was out of the ordinary – neither the grey-haired, grandmotherly woman he introduced to DDG as the woman he hoped to marry, nor the bouquet of highly aromatic onions crowning her head.

“How do you do,” I said, extending my hand to her. She was staring at the onions.

“I can’t stand the odor,” I went on, “but they make lovely curls, don’t you think?”

The dream then dissolved into a blur of faintly remembered activity, until we came to the scene of my awakening, literally and figuratively.

My dream-love and I had gone outside to a vine-covered terrace for privacy. He pulled me into an embrace; a hug I didn’t want to end. I knew he was getting ready to ask me to marry him. I also knew I was a few years older than he was, and we had never discussed our ages.

“But, you don’t know my age,” I began.

“It doesn’t matter to me how old either of us is,” he answered. “Love knows no such boundaries.”

Cue the sound of romantic Spanish guitar music playing in the background. (Oh, yes it did!)

“You need to know this, if you are about to propose marriage, and I think you are,” I foolhardily insisted. He hugged me closer and murmured something sweet (but unintelligible) into my crown of onions.

“I’m forty-one,” I started to say, but something was telling me I had it all wrong.

“No!” I said, pulling away from his loving embrace. “I’m sixty-one!”

The guitar serenade ceased in mid-note, ending like a bird in mid-squawk. The sunlight filtering down through the flowering vines went out like a cheap light bulb, and I was left in that darkening limbo world between sleep and wakefulness, and even that was rapidly disappearing.

Now I know how it feels to age twenty years in a few nanoseconds of time. It feels a lot like when you’ve been swimming for a long time then try to climb out of the pool too fast, but it isn’t your swimsuit that seems to pull you downward, though. It’s your own skin, your own soul, your own heart and mind...your own misspent, unloved youth.

-

-

It’s every mistake you’ve ever made, every love you’ve ever lost, every love you threw away. It is all the regrets you didn’t even know you had.

It is the realization – and, even more weighty, the acceptance – of just where you are along your life’s road and the fact that the end of your road is approaching faster than the dream had faded.

I am sixty-one, and I'm afraid any love I will find now exists only in my dreams.

So, next time, I’m keeping my damned mouth shut...and I’m taking my own roses with me, just in case.

(Photo of wild rose, above, by Jeff Gold, http://www.sover.net)

Passages

Indian Summer has passed.

It died overnight, just as it had arrived. Our nights are in the mid-30s to high-40s now, and daytime temps might go as high as 70F. This is my favorite time of year, in part because of the cooler weather. I feel more energized in fall, more optimistic...which seems at odds with the natural rhythm of the season.

This is a time for fallow fields and naked trees, when very little grows anymore except the length of the nights, and of the shadows across the landscape at an earlier hour each day. Lots of people feel a great sadness at this time of year -- my youngest sister, for one. Sandra associates autumn with loss, and fights mild depression for several weeks.

I look forward to autumn, my level of excitement and anticipation rising as the temperatures drop and the leaves change color. I can smell Fall coming, just as I can smell rain coming in Spring and Summer. Even the Earth smells different in fall, especially around here with so many fruit orchards in the area. It is harvest time, of course, and that has something to do with the scents on the breezes. Cornstalks and the last crop of hay being cut; apples, pears and vineyards redolent of sweet juices; the earthiness of potatoes and cabbages, carrots and beets...and the smell of all those leaves.

It started raining leaves a couple of days ago, when the daytime temps began to drop and we were hit with brief, intermittent showers -- spritzes. I was washing dishes when I heard what I thought was heavier rainfall, but couldn't see rain out the kitchen window...a puzzlement I had to solve. I opened the backdoor and saw a torrent of falling leaves -- maroon dogwood leaves, bright lemon-yellow witch hazel, purple and red and zebra-striped orange-and-green leaves of the native persimmons...and the paintbox riot of color from the huge old sassafras at the side of the house. On top of the sight and scent of the leaves is the wonderful rustling, whispering sound they make as they hit each other and the trees on their way down.

Thank you, dear God, for this great feast for my senses each autumn. I am awe-filled, blessed and deeply grateful.

(Photo of native persimmon leaves by M. C. McLemore, October 2008)