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. ©

The End is Near---no, not that one! Markets and Madness

The farmers market in the fall is a different place than the beehive of activity it is in the summer. It wasn’t just the sparseness of shoppers and fewer tents lined up against a backdrop of fall colors along the river. It was also the sight of vendors wearing knit hats and gloves as they sipped on steaming cups of coffee. The sweet aroma of the kettle corn maker, the baker and the flower vendors still filled the air but in place of vendors selling cucumbers, corn, peppers and tomatoes were tables overflowing with squash, pumpkins, root vegetables and apples. Instead of tender plants for gardeners were bulbs and potted mums. I bought cinnamon bread, heads of broccoli and cauliflower plus carrots and squash to hold over the winter (wrapped in newspaper and stored in the garage). I was going to buy a bouquet of mixed cut flowers but I fell in love with huge stems of cut ornamental kale and I bought three in dark lilac fading to soft mauve. 

One more week and the market will close and I’ll go back for potatoes and maybe breakfast at a nearby place that was a favorite of my husband’s. It’s a terrible place to get into with a wheelchair but the market people who frequent the place always went out of their way to help with the double doors. Don never seemed to notice how many machines dispensing gumballs and newspapers people had to move out of his path. All he ever saw was their friendly, smiling faces. It was a gift not to notice the inconveniences of going to that old, tourist town restaurant because that sort of thing tends to make a lot of disabled people stay at home. I suppose it was because Don, the master storyteller in his pre-stroke days, was used to being the center of attention. I, on the other hand preferred then, as I do now, to be like a camera drone recording life from a safe distance. And from my bird’s eye view I’m happy to report that most people show kindness when it counts. Motivational speaker and author Steve Marabholi wrote: “It only takes a split second to smile and forget, yet to someone that needed it, it can last a lifetime.” Boy isn’t that a fact! Look how long I’m remembering the time and place of warm smiles and small gestures of kindness. 

On the opposite end of kindness is the meanness that has become part of our current election season and aren’t we all glad that, like the farmers market, the end is near. Am I alone is sensing a shift in hostilities? People have made up their minds and in some cases have already voted. Soon, Facebook will no longer challenge my willpower and self-control to not get involved in nasty political exchanges with some in-law family members. One woman in particular has spent months posting extremist, hate-filled and offensive stuff but this morning I thought someone must have hacked her account when she posted a meme that read: “The less you respond to negativity the more peaceful your life will become.” I read that over several times and spent a full two minutes trying to decide if I should hit the key that would publish a response I had typed that read, “The less a person posts negativity the more peaceful everyone’s life will become.” In the end, I back-spaced my catty words off the reply box and left. Many people unfriend someone who bugs their sanity and temps them to leave civility behind but that’s not my style. I like to have my finger on the pulse of what family thinks…recording it like that camera drone overhead. But I will admit I no longer feel an ounce of warmth toward this woman…and all because of this election!

“Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Those words roll around inside my head, telling me I should have taken a stand on Facebook starting months ago, but my silence was insurance against getting turned down if I should ever need a ride to a med station or the hospital. I live close to In-Law Land so my silence was self-servicing and I’m not proud of that. If I do give in before the election and post a Facebook response to the “great, white hopes” of a Trump presidency or an armed resistance if he doesn’t win, I hope it will be something polite like the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on any single personality.” Can you tell I just got a new book titled, The Best Liberal Quotes Ever? ©

The photo at the top is of the fall cornucopia on my dining room table. I know they’re hopeless out of fashion but I’ve been making them since the early ‘70s and I still love them. The scarecrow below is on my front door and the four foot wooden trencher is along my breakfast bar. (If there isn’t a holiday around, the trencher gets filled with stones and fossils.) And last but not least are my farmers market cut kale.