Please - Try to Contain Yourself

I live in that part of the country where all green things grow themselves.  Seriously.  Those fuzzy seed deals that drop from the tree in our front yard must be stopped before they hit the ground, or an instant forest - complete with squirrel families - pops up at dawn.

This was not a fact of my life before I moved here.

As a child, I was aware of exactly two seasons in Wyoming:  Mild Winter and Bad Winter.  During Mild Winter my mother frantically planted hundreds of petunias in the hope that seven or eight blooms would survive long enough to create a floral whiff in the late August storm that blew in with Bad Winter.

Mild Winter was when the sagebrush blitzed through its entire life cycle - twice - and basketball-sized white poofs plummeted like bombs from the cottonwood trees.  My hay fever stayed Out Of Control despite years of injections, inhalations, and eye drops, but the advice I most clearly remember our doctor telling my mother was that I should wear sunglasses.

Can doctors legally play practical jokes when insurance reimbursement is involved?

It was hard enough to avoid the City Park's cottonwood trees with swollen eyeballs, but the sunglasses rendered me completely blind.  Stunned tourists frequently offered food at the tops of their lungs as I stumbled between picnic tables looking for my family.

I left Wyoming after high school and moved to Phoenix.  My limbs thawed rapidly thanks to the seasons:  Mild Summer and Bad Summer.

Landscaping consisted of tiny, scrabbly rocks.  Most "lawns" had spiny succulents stabbing up from the gravel - seeming to double-dog dare that sun to bake off even one more needle!

The sun always obliged.

The ritzy lawns in Scottsdale had actual grass, bordered by flowers normally found in Ohio.  They also had people hired to stand outside all day clutching garden hoses in both hands.

The impact of my move to the Midwest is illustrated here by the Gasp Factor.

When I first stepped off the plane that July afternoon, my lungs were greeted by enough humidity to fill a child's wading pool.   I gasped!

I flashed the International-Hands-Around-Throat-Because-I'm-Dying symbol at the Southwest Airlines captain who was grinning from the cockpit and thanking us for flying.  (Side note:  Why ever do those pilots do that?  We should all - every single soul - be hands-on-fuselage kissing their feet for landing those things like they do.)

I managed to squawk out a plea for an ambulance.  Instead, a super-smiley stewardess herded me into the waiting area for New Arrivals From Desert Climates.

On my way from the airport to my new home I was completely engulfed in a sea of dark green.  I gasped!  Apparently, there is a connection between humidity and foliage of freakish dimensions....

On and on it went.

Summer eased out and the trees turned crazy shades of gold.  I gasped!

Winter blew in and I did not change expressions....  Long before age 12 I had learned to maneuver in drifting blizzards, and I can still tell you which way to turn the wheel in a spin whether you're driving or walking.  Those prissy, sissy, namby-pamby Midwesterners panicked at the first snowflake, cancelled school if the forecast called for two snowflakes, and knew nothing about winter survival.

Then my first ever ice storm hit.  I gasped!  I called a friend and screamed into the phone:  IT. IS. RAINING. ICE!  IT. IS. RAINING. ICE!  I finally shut up when the power went out.

The morning a crocus peeked up out of the snow, I choked.  Coughed a little - then I gasped!  That whole first year was like living in one those foreign phenomenon books we read in grade school called "Earth's Four Seasons."

I signed up for today's class, Container Gardening, to learn about containing some of this nature.  It's everywhere!  I do not waste energy installing flowers - my "garden" time is spent digging up whatever new green thing has staged the latest takeover.

Bonus head scratcher:  Someone exclaimed early on, "Oh, gosh!  You're so lucky - you have hostas!  Hostas are expensive and they're so hard to grow!"  Probably the realtor before we signed the papers.

I babied those plants for approximately two days before resorting to a machete to keep them from ringing the doorbell every night.  'Hosta' is the root word for 'hostile.'  (See 'takeover' above.)

The Container Gardening teacher turned out to be a Renaissance Woman.  She landscapes, tuckpoints, makes herbal remedies, farms, does carpentry - all while raising children and a husband.  And she managed to keep her lovely smile going when faced with questions like, "How do I get rid of tulips that clash with the bricks on my house?"

But instead of teaching tricks on home wilderness containment, Mrs. Renaissance tricked us into taking home more plants - probably the flowers she'd dug up from her own garden that morning.  Nice move.  It fooled the whole class.  I should have brought hosta clippings for everybody.

We made hanging flower baskets - no artistic talent allowed - and were assured they were beautiful, no matter how many tall things we had crammed in with how many short things.  And, obviously, watering would not be a big deal.

In Wyoming, we only watered during the mildest part of Mild Winter to avoid icicles on petunia petals.

In Arizona, if we skipped one day of watering, the geranium's skeleton by the carport shamed us the next morning.

But in the Midwest?  We water our tomatoes daily just for something to do, and even after a two-week vacation there is still plenty to harvest.

Occasionally, when returning home by plane, I'll find someone struggling for breath on the jetway bridge.  I always stop and offer my arm.  We stagger to Baggage Claim.  The person begs me to call 911.  Instead, I promise they will grow functioning gills and become rare hosta experts in no time.  I show them photos of my container garden on its first day

and the way it looked 48 hours later.

Sometimes they tell me they could never live in a place like this.

I always gasp.

(Does Yellowstone National Park really have anything to do with how stars in our solar system got their names?  Let's meet right back here next Friday and find out!) 

Her Majesty's (Microscopic) Kingdom

HAH!  AHAH!

I'VE GOT IT!

THE BIG, FAT SCONE SECRET!

There's a certain something involved in baking the perfect scone, and I just sat through what may be the only class in the world to let it slip:

You have got to be born in England.

This Wrong-Side-of-the-Pond newsflash was as jarring as the Island Surprise that hit me hard as a child:  my brother Randy announced that I could not be a full-time hula dancer since I hadn't been born in Hawaii.  I was so ticked off at my parents when I heard that crushing truth - and for good reason!  I was left with mere months to decide on another profession before kindergarten started.

Hindsight suggests the real possibility that Randy made the whole thing up.  A ruse to trick me into shelving the hip sway and unhanding his cap gun holster that I used as a grass skirt.  So selfish!  Later on, he and his friend Chip diagnosed me with a hyperactivity disorder - all because I never allowed both feet to land on the planet at the same time for a period of about three years.  I needed that grass skirt.

I had expected a scone baking class to reveal the source of, oh gosh, maybe some extremely rare flour - grown in a secret corner of the world where drizzly mists combine with brilliant sunlight bouncing off ancient stone buildings while that howly flute music floats in over the glen or dale or whatever.

I had no idea I'd have to alter my birth certificate.  Again.

But even before the instruction began, I had blasted this option off my post-retirement radar when our teacher (a compilation of disinterested attitude sifted through with complete boredom and sprinkled with flat affect) dropped several sticks of butter into a big bowl of totally pedestrian flour, followed by several cups of whole cream.

My metabolism squeaked audibly.  It voted we skip the whole chew-swallow-eyebrow-raising scene (ordinarily my favorite part of any warm scone) and just scotch tape those suckers directly onto my behind.

Skip the baking part even.  Just bust out the tape.

Although I'd never baked a scone per se, I had gotten my hands intimately involved with boxes and boxes of Bisquick in the 1970s, so I already knew how much I loved the smell of hot, adulturated flour browning in the oven.

Bisquick taught bakers how to focus on recipes for a brand new reason.  The final outcome was assured - failure was literally impossible - but you were on your own when it came to remembering during that first taste whether you had made the pancakes, the pineapple-upside-down sheet cake, or the cinnamon monkey bread.

They were the only recipes in the whole history of gullets not made better or worse by too much salt, possibly because Bisquick was crowned the White Blood Cell of the Food World - effectively neutralizing every foreign thing in its path.

But man, oh, man - those were some gorgeous coffee cakes!  (Or were those the dumplings?)

Scones turned out to be extremely easy, too, but the ingredients - when arranged just so on the cutting board - spelled out the words DEATH TRAP.

Okay, wow.

Ever notice how your super-hungry stomach growls at the sight of any food?  Yeah.  Mine, too.  Except this food.

The classmates to my right and left got to enjoy the sounds of my carotid arteries chipping away at plaque I've been saving up since the aforementioned 1970s.  (For you youngsters, this was when Bacon Bits were discovered and sprinkled on anything that stood still for 1.5 seconds.)

Those crazy carotids were on a mission!  They, along with several of their closest arterial buddies, were shoveling the plaque piles closer to my brain to make room for orange-chocolate-chip and rosemary-asiago beauties, which arrived hot from the oven and into my mouth exactly 90 minutes apart.

Dang it!

I had naively thought before class that this would be the one - the end of my search.  I'd already formed the perfect future in my head:  One of those quaint coffee houses where the smell of fresh scones mingles with soft, tinkly piano music and wafts into the nostrils of super-relaxed, Intelligent Book readers whose arms and legs drape devil-may-care-ishly across the backs of overstuffed chairs.

This morning that sounds quite a bit like a zoo.  I even see spectators throwing dog kibble.

Another problem with this class was the teacher's technique, which caused my entire immune system to sit up and take pictures.  Measuring spoon dropped on the floor?  No biggie.  I thought he would at least pretend to wipe it on his apron before plunging it into the Costco-sized spice bucket.

After kneading the dough, he passed the giant mixing bowl around the room so all twelve of us could 'give it a pinch.'  A pinch! I wanted to pinch everybody's wrists with my teeth.  UNHAND THE DOUGH!   I felt my thymus attempt to strangle my silent chicken voice box, which just kept drooling as if under the magic spell of scone hypnosis.

Is England suffering an Infection Control Department shortage?  How quickly we forget a few plagues!  Maybe all that jolly good fog muddles the mind into believing a spot of afternoon tea makes everything all right? 

Nothing makes salmonella all right.  I mean - before it happens.  And even after it happens, it's just a bunch of dehydrated finger-crossing and (if you're real lucky) the entire village shouting God save the queen!

Near the end of the baking process, the teacher yawned as he herded us into the tiny kitchen and removed the pan from the oven so we could all test for doneness by pressing down on the tops of the scones.  With our total stranger fingers.

I'm embarrassed to admit that, on some bad advice from my thighs, I forfeited this particularly dicey coin toss.  I ate the scones.

But I have assured my metabolism, my arteries, my brain, and that pesky bunch in the immune system, that I am on the lookout for an especially aerobic form of exercise.  Maybe cricket. 

And this time I shall bring along enough hand sanitizer for the whole crowd.

(Too much dirt and not enough pretty?  Come back next Friday and I'll show you how Container Gardening can fix that very problem.)

Babalu!

On those days when I've temporarily forgotten the whole point of Sponge Brain Stretch Pant's pre-retirement project, I play a little game called I Know Whether I'll Like This Class Before I Even Take It.  So far, my most prominent talent is being wrong about the answer every single time.

"Women of the Drum" is a perfect example.  I took this class with my mother, of all people - the woman whose child-raising job description included warning us to stop drumming on the table.  Stop drumming on the side of the bathtub.  Stop drumming on your sister.

Except that my mother never issued those warnings.

Tattling was a different story, but I've yet to hear of a Professional Snitch class.  I could have taught graduate level courses on the subject by the time I could string three words together, and when my parents begged me not to spill the beans about my sister Jenny's birthday present?  I invented charades.  They should have known better than to suggest I keep that secret when it was the actual birthday girl with whom I shared everything - including a bed.  (Silent bed charades in total darkness is quite the challenge, but Jenny eventually caught my drift about the Pla-Doh.)

Neither Mom nor I had received musical instruction as adults, so we had one major worry regarding our drum session:  free-range laughter.  You know the kind - it happens without fail while visiting a friend's church on Christmas Eve when one of the choir angels belts out a failed operatic note that you did not see coming.

We rehearsed not looking at each other in the car on the way to class, but it didn't work; we peeked repeatedly to see if the other one was looking.  I never knew the scope of my peripheral vision until I noticed Mom's silent-shoulder-shaking without deviating my eyes from ten and two.

The class description said to call the leader if we needed to borrow a djembe drum.  I ran to the dictionary and found djembe's proper pronunciation - next to a drawing of a thing I'd never seen in my home.

I do remember a set of bongos my brother Randy had when we were little.  I used to hold them between my knees and "play" them while walking from room to room.  But walking and doing anything as a child was just one of my special deficits, so my performances (often thinly disguised efforts at diverting Mom's attention from the fact that it was bath night) incorporated random solo bursts on one or both kneecaps.

We called the leader and she loaned us what turned out to be two of the biggest drums I'd ever seen.

Honestly.

They were like those things I Love Lucy's husband played at the Coconut Club - or wherever his TV band entertained millions of 1950s housewives who wished they lived in Cuba.

Djembe translates to "come together in peace."  We wrapped our legs around the bases to keep them from turning on us in case they sensed we had not Googled their translation beforehand.  Now Mom and I had a much bigger worry than cracking each other up in front of women who had been gathering in peace for more than a decade:  we were one ill-timed leg cramp away from dropping someone's ancient ritual on its tautly stretched goatskin head.

We learned a Haitian spring planting song that required each half of the circle to play separate parts.  Our leader showed more patience than Ricky Ricardo mustered during Lucy's entire pregnancy.  Every few seconds, a couple of extremely loud beats lined up and, while I've never been to Haiti, I felt confident our version sounded like the real thing.  I expected little spring sprouts to appear near my tightly curled toes.

I could eventually close my eyes for several seconds without tipping over, and my own heartbeat synchronized with that of my drum.  Probably the Haitian section of my heart I never met while growing up, so preoccupied was I with getting away from those pesky mountains and sequestering myself in the 'civilized' land of glass and concrete.

As the last of the sounds died down, the drummers said other newcomers hadn't kept up as well as we did.  Shocked at the compliment, I threw Mom and myself under the talent bus by raving about how little artistic, athletic, and musical ability either of us had ever possessed.  Really!  I practically screamed.  We're AWFUL!

Mom just smiled and nodded.  She's been out of Reprimand Mode for a while, but should have told me to speak for myself.  She should have put her hands back on that drum and composed an impromptu I Can't Hear You song.

Her new song would remind me about the years of dinners she'd orchestrated, every night for seven people, after working all day.  It would reveal how she'd channeled her inner Band Leader - refusing to bolt during a nightclub fire as long as dancers remained on the floor - every time I practiced my clarinet in fourth grade.  I still recall a smorgasbord of flat notes screeching from that horn as I tapped one foot against the linoleum and tried to ignore the spit dripping off the bell.

Yuck.

It would not have been any better if I'd had a real drum as a child.  I believe djembe is something you grow into - lifting your life lines way up in the air and pounding them down with abandon.  Frustration?  Gone.  Tension?  Goodbye.

My mother should have had her own djembe years ago to drown out the teasing, the tattling, and especially the clarinet.  It would have been so worth it to skip dinner occasionally in favor of a Wyoming spring planting song.

That's it!

While I don't know enough about these drums to recommend them as a full-time post-career choice, I can say that hearts pounding in rhythm makes an excellent (not-so-secret) birthday present for somebody you really love.

Happy 84th, Mom.

(Ever wonder about special ingredients in a really good scone?   They will be revealed right here next Friday.  Please don't say I didn't warn you.)

Were You Raised in a Prehistoric Barn?

I do not know when the term 'biological clock' was coined, but I'm betting it happened with the discovery of natural light.  When that first cave person etched ruts in the kitchen wall to record the daily ascension of the big, hot, yellow ball over the smoking volcano, she exclaimed - probably on the second day - I'm almost at the end of my ten-year life span!  WHY HAVEN'T MY CHILDREN INVENTED BOWLING?

Or words to that effect.

After exactly one day of kindergarten, my daughter Abi came home and matter-of-factly stated, "Mama, I forgot to learn how to jump rope."

Arrrrgh!!!!  I have often wondered since that day - What the heck else was I doing for five entire years?

Most people develop a sense of impending SOMETHINGness at a certain point in their lives.  Personally, I am nagged by the fact that I have not yet started to practice Grandma Stuff.

True, I'm not a grandmother at this moment, but what if it happened in the future?  Would I magically understand how intricate lace doilies are born and grow up to be dusty doll skirts that hide Kleenex boxes?  Is there a snowball's chance in Phoenix that a perfectly browned peach cobbler would emerge from my recipe file, much less my oven?  And - most importantly - WOULD MY GRANDBABY'S CRIB BE LITTERED WITH THOSE ADORABLE STUFFED CROCHETED OCTOPUS DEALS?

No.  It would not.  None of these things would happen, and so I set out to rectify what I could.

I left the doily part of the equation up to the Salvation Army since those things will survive in thrift store "Housewares" until long after everybody dies.  It's a comforting thought, in case I need to buy one someday.  Let's say one of my Grandchildren-To-Be writes a report on World-Class Oddities of the Past, and cannot for the tiny life of them think of one thing to use.

"Stand back," I'll say.  "These things bite."

My hope springs eternal for a hands-on class totally devoted to peach cobbler.  I know better than to trust myself with an online lesson, as I am inevitably drawn to the magic part of the computer that lets me check in on important people like Suri Cruise.  (Lightning Prayer:  May the Gods of Procrastination have mercy on my soul if many more royal babies arrive in England during my lifetime.)

My list-slashing left me with the crocheted crib buddies.  Not a problem!  Our local yarn shops understand laziness like mine.  I signed up for a Beginning Crochet class that met four times, and I fully expected to make an animal on the first night.  Okay - not a real complicated animal.  Maybe something nearing extinction so a future grandchild couldn't question the appendage dimensions.

I had a lot of faith in our teacher - a very sweet YOUNG person who will be more than crazy-prepared when her grandchildren arrive.  She had crocheted the shirt she was wearing, as well as her socks, tote bag, and possibly her pants and shoes.  I was psyched!

Our first assignment was a scarf.  Honestly?  A scarf?  Didn't the first cave persons crochet these out of boredom using each other's hair?  I watched a lot of safari shows as a child.  That cave person spare time should have been used to invent leggings for those mini-leopard dresses, or perhaps a sewing machine that could get a hem straight.

I raised my hand and asked to make an animal, which made the teacher smile - so happy to have the class idiot reveal herself right out of the gate.  But I am nothing if not a problem solver, so I decided I'd simply turn my completed scarf into a crib snake.  Duh.

We were told to begin with 20 stitches, but I wanted more than that - 20 stitches would only make a garter snake!  So I kept going and almost stopped at 30, but that is such a predictable number.  Thirty-two sounded a little better, but I loved the roundness of 33.  However - you guessed it - that's an odd number.

I stopped at 38, which turned out to be a LOT to keep track of back and forth on each row.  We were warned about the hazards of accidentally adding stitches by picking up an extra loop on the way across, or dropping stitches by not picking up that secret, hidden loop on each end.

My technique was fairly consistent - I picked up extras and dropped originals in almost equal numbers.  As the scarf grew, the raggedy sides staggered in and out, resembling the path a rat takes through a maze after scarfing down eighteen Hershey kisses.

The "finished edge" option was not made available to me, and not only because I didn't finish my assignment.  My teacher couldn't figure out where to start without first defining which part most closely resembled an "edge."

Luckily, in the second class I got to put my scalloped partial snake away and start dishcloths with everybody else.  Dishcloths?  Box turtle bodies!  Obviously!

I did my best with directions written in a code that would have shortened World War II by at least a year.  After a few circular "rows" I decided to use my Glass-Half-Full approach and create a line of Crocheted Abstract Animals after I retire.  They'll come equipped with names that give important clues to help figure out their species.  Fun!

But a more important decision came to me after the classes were all over:  I'll tell Abi the truth.

1.)  Kleenex boxes get more "attractive" every year - no ornamentation necessary. 

2.)  Sara Lee has surely died by now, although her company lives on and has got to be using organic peaches in their cobblers.

3.)  Babies who cuddle up with stuffed animals riddled with giant, randomly spaced holes run the very serious risk of weird skin rashes. 

What matters is that since the dawn of time, long before the invention of the jump rope, parents have loved their children and grandchildren with a ferocity that apparently won out over that of the saber-toothed animals. 

I forgot to learn how to do all kinds of things.  Formulating the perfect priority list wasn't one of them.

(Do you hear that jungle beat in the distance?  It will be louder than heck next Friday when I tell you all about Women Of The Drum.)