The Wind's Gift

 

The wind left me a gift yesterday.  As I got in my truck after church, I found a perfect oak leaf on my seat, painted by autumn.  One leaf, such a simple thing but so amazing.  It’s one of the things I love about fall – when the trees put on their party dresses and the air grows cool and quiet.  When I sit on my front porch, I can hear the silence.  The birds are subdued, the insects whisper and even the owls in the holler sound sleepy.  The autumn light is drifting lower in the southern sky and the stars take on more clarity, moving in their eternal journey across the heavens.  I feel sorry for city dwellers, who can seldom see the stars through the city lights.  There is a feeling of connection, looking at the big dipper and knowing that we are looking at the same group of stars that the stone age men saw.  Our ancestors sailed to the new world, guided in part by the constellations that have graced the sky since the beginning of time and will remain after we are gone.  Just like the changing of the leaves and the new buds that appear the following spring, we follow the familiar cycle of each year.

Just like the cycles of the seasons, we create our own traditions to go along with those cycles. In my little town, we have just passed a busy month, which seems to have come and gone at warp speed.  Halloween  is celebrated here with a vengeance, and this year the town square has been invaded by an army of skeletons.  Creativity flowed as businesses fought to outdo each other in decorating light poles.  We ran out of poles early on, so the creations spilled over into freestanding displays in grassy areas and even crept off the square to the highways leading to town.  Skelebrate Halloween was the theme and it was a joy to watch families tour the sidewalks, examining skeleton carpenters, auto repair skeletons, dentist and pharmacist skeletons, Edgar Allen Poe, Minnie Pearl, and the Wicked Witch (with a Toto skeleton  in her basket), even a skeleton horse pulling a buggy.  Then there was my favorite – Willie Nelson sitting beside our Minnie Pearl statue, strumming his famous guitar. 

Against this backdrop, back-to-back events took place, one old favorite  and the other in its first year.  A Haunted Tour of the Square led participants on a walk around town to hear spooky stories rooted in the town’s history, including a ghostly trip to the centuries-old town cemetery.  The following night it was the Halloween Parade, a particularly unique event invented by a Halloween loving family when their lawn decorating efforts outgrew their lawn over ten years ago.  Every year the parade seems to get a little bigger, the crowds seem to grow a little larger, and the amount of candy thrown off the floats and out of the cars boggles the mind.  It’s as much fun to watch the kids, many giving their Halloween costumes a trial run before trick or treat night itself, enjoying the floats and picking up the candy as it is to watch the parade.  I stood beside a family with two of the cutest little boys – a red-head and a tow-head and both dedicated harvesters of candy.  The red-head in particular with his backwards baseball cap was single-minded in his pursuit of the treats.   On the other side was a baby who looked to be about 6 or 8 months old.  I would love to have known what was going through her little mind as she watched the string of ghosts, goblins, giant pumpkins and other creatures fill the streets of Centerville.  After the parade, her young parents posed for pictures with their baby, so that even if she has no memory of her own about this night, she will know that she was there. It's one of life's great blessings to live in a place where so many people go to so much trouble just to make things fun for our kids!

By the actual night of Halloween, the skeletons were beginning to look a little bedraggled and the perfect weather for the previous weekend’s festivities had morphed into a cloudy, rainy evening.  Not to be deterred, a cavalcade of costumed trick or treaters took to the streets, tramping up and down the pavement calling “Trick or treat.”   There is no way to estimate numbers, but my friends who live on the most popular trick or treat street ran out of candy by 6:30. 

And so, with the turning of the calendar page, November is here.  Jack-o-Lanterns are replaced by turkeys and pilgrims and thoughts turn to making apple pies and cornbread dressing.  The trees are shedding their party clothes and a carpet of red and gold covers the yard.  Daylight savings time ends – tell me again why we keep doing this – and afternoons are way too short.  Now, if I can just remember what size turkey I bought last year and where I put the extra tablecloths.

 

Questions

A while back, I went to town with my pants on backwards.  I didn’t realize they were on backwards until I started in the door of the store and tried to put my phone in my pocket, which, instead of being in the front was mysteriously in the back.  “Oh well,” I thought, “maybe no one will notice.”

Not long after that trip, I had a doctor’s appointment for my yearly “medicare checkup.”  I don’t know when they started this tradition, but I do know that they will drive you crazy calling you to ask you to set up this date until you finally say yes.  As far as I can tell, the only difference between a medicare checkup and any other checkup are the number of questions they ask.  Even before you get there, they call you and ask a long list of questions – things like how many times you have fallen in the last year, if you have had any feelings of despair lately, and if you are able to do your own housework.  I never know exactly how to answer those kinds of questions.  When they say “fallen,” do they mean just random falls, like when you are just walking along and you fall down?   Or do they mean when you fall off the horse, or the dog trips you, or the leg of the chair  you are sitting in breaks and you and the chair end up on the ground?  Because those are falls that have a reason.  As for despair, I have those feelings every time I try to light the pilot light on my gas logs, or untangle all those cords in the back of my television, or find the hammer that I know I just used last week but can’t remember where I last saw it.  Is that the kind of despair they want to know about?  As far as my housework is concerned, I’m able to do most of it; I just don’t want to do any of it.  That’s why my house looks like it does.

Then when you get to the clinic, they hand you another round of questions to answer.  These questions are multiple choice, but the choices don’t ever fit.  For instance, “how many times do you drink?”  Well, it depends.  I might have two drinks in one week, but then I don’t have any drinks for the next three weeks.  They want you to say you have one a week or 2 a week or several a week.  I might have several one week but I don’t have several every week.  They need a choice that says “Other.”  This questionnaire asks again about feeling despair but I just say no because there is no place to explain about the lost hammer, the pilot light, or the cords behind the TV. 

Then when you get in the exam room, there is another set of questions.  The nurse asked if I live alone.  “I guess you mean other humans,” I said.  Because when you have four large dogs, you are never alone.  Not at the table, not on the couch, not in the bathroom (if you aren’t quick enough at closing the door), not in the bedroom, nowhere are you ever alone.

Then it’s time for the test.  The nurse gives you three words to remember and asks you to draw a clock face and set the hands at 11:10.  The three words are not usually that hard – I just make up a little story using the words, and I can still tell time.  But they are going to have to come up with a different test someday because I don’t think they even teach kids how to tell time with a regular clock nowadays.  There was a third question, but I don’t remember what it was.  One of my friends says that she drills her parents on how to answer the questions on the way to their doctor’s appointment, asking them who the president is, what year it is, and making sure they remember their name and birthdate.  Since I drive myself to the doctor, I don’t have anyone to help me practice.  The dogs don’t know any questions to ask other than, “Are you going to eat all that sandwich?”  Or, “Are you leaving again and when will you be back?”

I wonder what they do with the questions and answers after you leave?  Are they saved and recorded somewhere so that somewhere down the line, they can refer back to see if you had two drinks in 2024 or how many times you fell in 2023?  How many times do you have to fall before they become alarmed?  What if you miss a word on the test or forget which is the long hand and which is the short hand on a clock?  And what about the questions they don’t ask?  Like, how many names do you have to go through before you get the right name for the dog that is chasing the cat?  Or, how long did it take you to get up off the ground when the chair collapsed with you in it?  Or who was that woman in the store that you had a long conversation with even though you have no idea who she was or how you knew each other?  Or what was the name of that poem about the old house on the side of the road that you memorized long ago?  Or, did you ever find your hammer and get the pilot light lit?  They didn’t even ask me if I have ever gone to town with my pants on backwards.

Under the Maple Tree

 

Last Sunday, I spent most of the afternoon lying in a lounge chair under my maple tree.  Early afternoons on the porch are hot this time of year even with a breeze, directly in the sun.  But it was pleasant under the big tree with a nice, lazy breeze and sunlight trickling through the leaves. 

I told myself I was reading, although my book spent more time turned down in my lap than in front of my eyes. Even though the temperature still shouts summer, the change in the light whispers fall.  It has been another hot, arid summer and most of the flowers have thrown in the towel.  The four-o-clocks are wilted, and I noticed after church that even the artificial flowers at the cemetery look bedraggled.

As I lay in my chair, I heard wild geese.  They flew right over my tree, so low I thought they were going to hit the highest branches.  There were at least 15 or 20, and I am sure they were on their way to the big pond on the next farm.  There is just something about wild geese that touches my heart every time.  Can anyone hear wild geese fly over without looking up to see?  The katydids and crickets still sing, but their normally cheerful voices are muted, as if they know summer is beginning its slow glide toward fall.

The dogs are scattered around my chair, lazy in the heat of the day.  Every now and then, one will rouse and come to visit, wanting reassurance that I still love them.  Scout, who still thinks he is a lap dog, tries to get on the chair with me and I have to explain that the weight limit on this seat does not include a one-hundred-pound collie.  His look makes it clear that he does not approve of such flimsy chairs.

The old tree would have stories to tell, if it could talk, about decades of seasons in this spot.  It is the only big maple left now from the four that shaded my childhood.  They were planted by my great-great grandfather when he built this house.  His son, my great grandfather named the farm for those trees – Maple Shade Farm.  A storm took the others two decades ago, and the remaining tree has lost a few big limbs.  It used to be a chore to rake all the leaves in the front yard.  Now there aren’t even enough to bother with. I would gladly tackle the job if I could have even one or two of the old trees again.

 A battered picnic table sits under the tree, where bushels of corn have been shucked, countless watermelons have been cut, homemade ice cream has been churned, birthdays have been celebrated, and children and puppies have played in its fallen leaves.  If I listen with my eyes closed, I think I can hear the echoes of laughter and the scramble of puppy feet. 

A swing used to sit there, until another storm destroyed the frame.  It was a Christmas present for my parents, from forty years ago.  My husband and I carried it on foot, laughing every step, from our nearby house to theirs on a cold Christmas Eve.  I don’t know how we got it there without dropping it and if my parents’ bedroom had not been on the back side of the house, they would surely have heard us.  It was big enough to hold 4 or 5 children plus my mom, who was practically child sized herself.  I don’t remember a big swing in the yard when I was growing up, but I do remember a tire swing Daddy put up for me, a glider and some old metal lawn chairs.  I would love to have those chairs now, and I am mystified as to where they went and why on earth we thought we should dispose of them.  Those old metal chairs probably didn’t have a weight limit on them – Scout would have approved.

 

The Sock Hop

 

We had a sock hop at my house last night.  “We” is probably not the correct word, because I was not invited to the event.  The dogs had a sock hop, or a canine version of a sock hop. Scout, Sophie and Carli were the participants, and I’m pretty sure the whole thing was Carli’s idea and that she furnished the socks.  I woke up in the night a couple of times and heard the rustling of the plastic bag as Carli was stealing the socks.  The second time, I’m pretty sure, was when she took the whole bag.  I didn’t get up then, but when I finally did, socks were strewn from one end of the bedroom to the other end of the living room, with a shredded bag in the middle of the floor. 

The socks came from a bag I had filled with odd socks, socks with holes in them and stretched out socks that crawl down into the toes of my shoes when I wear them.  I had left them on the chest at the foot of my bed.  Ordinarily the bag would have been covered with other clothing I had thrown there but I had straightened up before I went to bed last night and the bag was there, a temptation that could not be resisted.  Plastic bags, bubble wrap and plastic bottles are also irresistible to my merry band of collies.  Sophie is also a connoisseur of cardboard boxes and sticks.  The only reason I don’t have large sticks in my house is that she hasn’t figured out how to fit them through the dog door.

Finding articles of clothing strewn around the house, the yard and the yard next door is not unusual.  The dogs’ fascination with clothing is a sure incentive to keep my clothes picked up and out of reach.  Out of reach covers very little territory, since all three dogs are almost as tall as I am when they stand on their hind paws.  And drawers must be tightly shut to keep collie noses out. My neighbor next door brought one of my shirts home last week and asked if I had missed it.  I hadn’t.  This morning, I found one of her shirts just outside the front yard.  She is the owner of one of Carli’s puppies and I suspect he has inherited more than just his coloring from his mom.

A couple of years ago, I put in a new storm door with a dog door built in.  My friends raised their eyebrows when I announced my intention.  “There is no telling what will come  in that door,” they warned.  Nothing has come in that I’m aware of, but a lot of things have gone out, thanks to the dogs.  Carli is especially prone to stealing shoes and clothes and taking them out into the yard, or further.  You do not dare leave a shoe of any kind where she can reach it.  She doesn’t tear them up; she just takes them outside and loses them.  I had a crate filled with dog toys in the living room.  The crate has been totally empty for several weeks now – all toys have been scattered all over the farm.  As I write this, there is one lone pull toy on the rug, and it does not even belong to my dogs.  It belongs to Ghost, who lives next door.  Mr. Squirrel, Mr. Horse, Mr. Giraffe, various squeaky toys, at least two kongs, and assorted old shoes have disappeared.  They would just as soon have socks and bottles and boxes anyway!

It's too hot to play outside much these days.  The dogs spend most of the daylight hours in the house asleep.  Scout has claimed one of the air conditioner vents as his very own and I finally had to move the side table that sits by it over.  His other favorite activity right now is playing beauty shop with my young cousins. 

They like to brush him and he is ecstatic to be brushed.  Natalie tells him to sit and he sits.  Eventually, he is so happy that he collapses on his side so she can reach him better.  When she stops, he reaches a paw up to pat her on the arm.  The other dogs crowd around Natalie's sister Olivia for their turn.  It's a dog's best life, here on the farm!