Fall Chores, Olds Books and the Devil’s Vomit

The weather here in West Michigan has been perfect. Warm. Sunny. Just the way I like it. But I didn’t like doing my weekend project. I had two vintage outdoor chairs and a couple of side tables that needed spray painting. The last time I did them I thought it would be the LAST time because, back then, I was hot and heavy into shopping for a condo and I planned on leaving them behind in a history-of-my-life tag sale. I’m too old to be wrestling metal, clamshell back chairs around. I built a cardboard paint booth so I could spray them on top of the deck instead of dragging them down to the back yard. Worked great but I still can’t figure out how I got sail blue paint up my nose. I was wearing a face mask and safety glasses. I hope the ears, nose and throat doctor I’ll see later this week for my ear doesn't notice, but I bet he will. It’s not every day he comes across blue nostrils. 

I make no secret out of the fact that fall is third place in my Favorite Season Contest. Over the years it’s brought nothing but hard work into my life. Now I hire most of my fall yard work but for more decades than I care to count I had to rake leaves at four houses. Sometimes more if Don was in one of his do-good-for-the-neighborhood widows mode. Plus we took down screens, wash windows and put up heavy wooden storm windows at two houses. That was in addition to moving an army of snowplow equipment out of storage in the country to maintenance and then to the parking lots where they’d be used. I’ll be in a nursing home before I'll get over the notion that with fall comes work and that I have to start gathering nuts and seeds and stocking my cave for the coming cold and snow. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I've never lived in a cave.

And have I mentioned I hate the orange color palette that Mother Nature will bring us soon? I appreciate that the trees turning into a riot of color is pretty but don’t expect me to like the fall landscape painting on your wall or that orange sweater you like to wear around Halloween. My grudge against orange runs deep. I wouldn’t eat anything orange as a kid---didn’t start doing that until I was forty---and I doubt that had anything to do with my brother telling me that Satan’s vomit is orange. I was spitting out carrots and squash before I understood words. Whoo! Do you think he was calling ME the devil because anything orange I attempted to eat came right back out Linda Blair style?

In college I acquired a book titled, Your Color and Your Self: The Significance of Color Preference in the Study of Human Personality. It help solidify my hate-fest toward orange. “In the general study of human likes and dislikes for color, orange ranks very low among the hues of the spectrum,” the author wrote. “Red personalities are wont to state that they ‘hate’ the color, while blue personalities may scowl at the sight of it.” That’s me. I openly hate the color and scowl at it too. I haven’t taken that book off the shelf in years much less opened it to read the passages that are underlined. Here’s what it says about my color preferences: “You have a secure hold on your passions and enthusiasms. There is weight to your character, real and implied. You like to be admired for your steady character and for your wisdom and sagacity, although the truth may be that you may spend little effort to warrant admiration.” Ohmygod! I wonder if I could use that in my obituary without getting in trouble with the gods of plagiarism! My apologies to the author, Faber Birren, if I ask my heirs to do it. Faber is dead now but he wrote forty books and 250 articles about color. 

In the above mentioned book there’s a chapter on how color effects people with neuroses and psychoses. Scary stuff on how our color preferences change with increased mental illness. For example, intoxicated alcoholics will prefer red but most of them will prefer something else when sober (and hint, be weary of anyone living with brown walls). You know what else is scary? The library fine that would be due on this book. It was checked out in 1962 but never returned. Oops! In my defense, it was probably the end of my junior year and I didn't return to the same campus the following semester, though I don't recall ever getting a letter from the college librarian demanding its return or they'd withhold transferring my credits.

Speaking of memory loss, this week I got two more punches on my Old Person Card. One because I hopped in my car to go to a Red Hat Society tea, unfortunately I was one week less five minutes too early. We meet in the community room of grocery store that has an extensive deli department so I loaded myself up with a spinach wrap and an orange-cranberry muffin for dinner. A half-gallon of French vanilla ice cream might have jumped into my basket as well. My other Old Person mistake was I signed up for a ‘Making Soup’ class at the senior hall and half way through the session I remembered I’d taken the same cooking class a few years ago. Not that it mattered. The chef served a good lunch and no one seemed to notice my sail blue nostrils. ©

Visiting the Cemetery

I was in my husband’s home town a lot this past week so I popped into the cemetery to---to do whatever it is we widows do while visiting a gravesite. I still haven’t figured out why we go. It’s not like Don is there, buried six feet under. Part of his ashes are but his ashes are all over the place: on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the winds over a ghost town he loved, along a nature trail, in our back yard, in a river that runs through town, in a locket, and in a four inch high, boxed urn tucked in a bookcase. I was a regular Johnny Appleseed when it came to spreading his ashes. I had to make myself stop coming up with places where I thought his ghost would like to roam. And I’m still surprised I didn’t find a way to ship some of his ashes out west to the mountains in Colorado, his favorite place on earth. I was on a mission that spring after he died. I told myself it was a mission to please him but I suspect I was just making sure I had places to visit Don that didn’t involve going to a gated community full of dead people. But you've got to admit, Don is now part of the Classic Elements: Earth, Air, Water and Fire and there is something poetic and eternal about that.

The cemetery is a pretty one full of trees and hills and they don’t restrict the height of the stones like so many places do. Don picked out the plot himself, based on the fact that his life-long friend and his wife bought the lots next door. Party time when we all join him there, I guess. That thought tickled Don’s sense of humor. This week, I did not expect to see the stone with our names on it so overgrown! Vegetation covered up half the surface since I’d been there earlier this year. It made me sad, mad and embarrassed that I hadn’t check on it sooner. I didn’t have any tools with me but I pulled out what I could, unearthing a nest of angry ants in the process. I tried but couldn’t ignore the ‘yuck factor’ the ants brought to the experience. Ants will take over the world….or so I’ve heard and now I have proof.

I stopped by my sister-in-laws house while I was out and about and we got on the topic of burial verse cremation. She wants to be buried and I said, “I don’t care what they do so long as they make sure I’m really dead first.” But I am getting cremated and my box of ashes will reside down with Don’s and the ants. Yuck, yuck, yuck! Have I mentioned YUCK! I don’t like ants. She doesn’t want her kids to spend a penny more on her funeral than she spent on her husband’s funeral and I said, “Considering how long ago he died and how much longer you can live you’re going to get buried in a cardboard box! Prices go up.” She laughed as I knew she would. My sister-in-law has been a presence in my life longer than my husband was at this point in time. How strange the math gets after someone dies. I’m now older than my husband was. He’s like one of those butterflies that got trapped in amber for all eternity. My memories of him are fossilized and grow yellow with age, perfectly preserved with no chance of growing in numbers. Maybe that’s why we widows go to cemeteries? We need to polish the amber from time to time, to see where we’ve been to know where we’re going. We give an accounting at the gravestone, ticking off on our fingers our widowhood accomplished. Hey, Don are you listening? Am I doing okay? Are you doing okay? What do you think about the classes I took? As I said these things in my head, I felt like Little Orphan Annie searching for her lost past and future all rolled into one. If only that were possible for widows like it is for orphans searching for their birth parents.

The trees at the cemetery are entering their show-off mode. Some people love the fall color palette---the yellows, browns, oranges and golds---but it’s my least favorite. It signals change and effects my moods in a negative way, says the woman who wouldn’t eat orange foods until I was over forty. Years ago I took a class on Color Psychology where I learned it wasn’t just in my head, there are physiological reactions to colors which explains why they don’t use orange in the psycho wards. Interior designers know this. People who create commercials know this but what does all this color talk have to do with a widow going to a cemetery? Not much. I just got sidetracked thinking about how much easier it is to visit in the spring when the promise of renewal is palatable in the air we breathe, when the crabgrass hasn’t claimed the stones and the ants are still hibernating underground. Out of sight, out of mind.

I didn’t cry while I was at the cemetery but I chocked up as I drove through the gates to go home. I could feel the tears behind my eyes begging to spill out. But I told them, “NO!” I am woman! I am strong and I will forge a new life for myself even if I die trying. ©