I'm home again in Lloyd and it was a lovely weekend on Dog Island. The funny thing about Dog Island is that a lot of people who have homes there only come down a few times a year and the Fourth of July is one of them.
We who have the luxury of living nearby know that the best months on the island are the fall and winter months when there is no one about and the temperatures allow more than early-morning and late-evening walks.
But amazingly, this Fourth of July was temperate. It was not incredibly hot and although storms passed to every side of us, we didn't get one drop of rain, although I wished we had. I love storms on the island, the wind whipping the pine trees and sea oats into a frenzy, its voice as it wails through the dunes a high, keening thing, making my little house a cozy nest, a safe place to be to watch nature have its way with the world.
The house next door to us on the west is almost never occupied. The people who own it live down in central Florida, which is funny, because that's where I went to high school, where I lived for some very formative years. They own a restaurant which is a regional landmark and I can tell from the way they act on the island that they don't get nearly enough ya-ya's out in their real life.
Bless their hearts.
The house to the east of us on the island is the home of a really incredible artist name Roger Leonard. He, as do many of the island residents, spends a few months in the summer time in more gentle and less broiling climes. So he wasn't home and it was strange, to walk past his house on the bay and not see a light on, but I'm sure that wherever he is, he's painting and probably thinking about the island. I sometimes never see Roger on the island, even if he's there, but sometimes I do. We might run into each other down at the beach at sunset and it's strange how even though we hardly know each other, we always seem to fall into conversation about some deep and meaningful stuff, the two of us. It's like we have no reason not to and so we do. I have another neighbor on the island that I feel the same way about and maybe it's because if you live on the island, you don't get a chance to have what we would call a social life and every interaction you have is fraught with all the meaning you don't leak out with bullshit stuff that happens in normal life and jobs and so forth. Let's face it- if you live by choice on a barrier island where there is no bridge and no cable and no decent drinking water, you really have a great need to spend a lot of time by yourself.
I'm planning to spend a week down there by myself for my birthday and this whole weekend I was thinking about that. I've spent a few weeks there by myself and it's always been wonderful, although I did have ONE night where I got the anxiety so bad I thought I might die and it was such a scary time that it still makes me take pause at the thought of going down there by myself but dammit, I'm going to risk it.
I'm going to take myself and a bunch of library books and my computer and my Worst Novel Ever Written to rewrite and food that I think I might want to eat and maybe some new strings of light I have stashed away from Target and by God I'm going to walk and do yoga and write and read and eat whatever I want and sleep whenever I want and watch every damn sunset and pray for a storm or two.
That's my plan.
My birthday plan.
I'll let you know how it goes, I'm sure.

A Different Island, Once My Own

Back in 1994, the year my friend Sue died, I was alerted to the fact that I could rent an apartment on St. George Island for something like $350 a month.
Now even fourteen years ago, this was a terrific bargain, even taking into account the fact that what we’re calling an apartment here was actually two rooms and a bathroom in a cement block four-plex. But what the hell? It was right across the road from the Gulf of Mexico on St. George, which had not been completely ruined yet.
My two oldest children were basically living their own lives by then but my two youngest were around the ages of eight and five and definitely still under my wing so they became my little roommates there for the summer in that block apartment with its yard of foot-torturing gravel and sandspurs.
I decorated the apartment with Dollar Store Christmas lights and colorful fish to hang on the wall made in China of reed and cloth (which I still have and which hang on the wall here in my bedroom on Dog Island) and every time we’d come back to the apartment after a trip home to Tallahassee, I’d burn sage for some reason. There were no particular evil spirits in that place as far as I knew but perhaps I burned it to purify something inside of me and if so, it did no harm, at least.
Mr. Moon came down on weekends to join us and to fish and it was my first and still most prolonged experience with living at the beach.
I was in a strange state of grief that summer and still feeling the effects of Sue’s death which had been such a profoundly holy experience that I was in some holy state myself it seemed, my heart opened by grief and the brief glimpse of the certainty that in this life we are only sandwiched between birth and death and the existence of other states of being on each side of those portals.
I do indeed think now that that summer I spent in my little concrete home by the Gulf was a time of holiness and if sage was one of the sacraments, so were beer and rum and limes and chips and salsa and Jimmy Buffett whose music (and say what you will about it) was exactly what I needed at that moment in my life.
At the time, the children were not as entranced with the beach life as I was, although they look back at it now with great affection. I had to force them to accompany me to the beach every morning, their brown little bodies slathered in sunscreen, with our thermos jug of Raspberry Crystal Lite, our towels, our beach toys, our books. They much preferred staying inside with the air conditioning and the TV to watch old reruns of Lucy and The Brady Bunch (we had cable!) but they would go with me, albeit grudgingly, and we would float in the gentle waves and sing Jimmy Buffett songs and in the evenings we would walk the beach after supper, watching the dolphins make their slow return from the cut, west to east, rising to breathe with noisy exhalations, then falling silently back into the water beside us, so close and yet in a different universe entirely and as all of the walls between the universes had become blurred to me when I accompanied Sue to that place she went, I was more than aware of what all that meant and the dolphins rising into the land of air and falling back into the land of water beside me was somehow comforting.
That summer was when I first learned how much I loved living out of doors as much as possible. We’d brought a cheap plastic table down and set it up right beside the apartment and that was where I sat to eat, to read, and to write while the children watched TV inside or played house under the fronds of the palm tree in front of the complex. I sat at that table even if it was hot or buggy or dark and at night I burned citronella candles and I read or wrote by those.
I began to write on yellow legal tablets: poems, short stories, and letters. This was a year before I got my first computer and I took up my pens, my paper and my thoughts and I wrote with a vengeance and a wonder.
It was all the beginning of something or some things, even as others had ended. It felt, at the time, as if I were doing so very little- playing with the children, cooking our meals, reading, dancing, spending hours by the Gulf, crying, laughing, sleeping, writing poems, watching the stars at night including the great blur of the Milky Way, visible then on the relatively still-unlit beach, but looking back I see how very much I was doing.
I want to say I was healing, but I don’t know if this is true. I think instead, it was more a time of integrating Sue’s passage than healing from her illness and death although I could be wrong.
We ended up renting an apartment in that little funky complex for three summers. The children were willing enough and they had come to love that island life, even if more for the ice cream shop they could walk to than the vast beauty of the ocean, the dunes, the sky, the birds. We journeyed to Apalachicola for shopping and adventures, to Jack Rudloe’s Marine Specimen’s Lab in Panacea to touch and learn about the sea creatures we saw on the beach, and we played bingo on Tuesday nights at the St. George fire station. One night Jessie won the jackpot and she used her winnings to buy herself her own pair of Panacea Nikes (rubber boots like the ones the workers in the seafood industry wore and which she coveted) at the store in East Point.
People came to visit us there in our little nest. My best friend from high school came and she and I (the kids stayed home with Dad that weekend) took ourselves skinny dipping late one night in the bath-water warm Gulf and we floated for hours under a full moon, talking about everything, sharing all the secrets we’d had no one to tell for all our years apart.
The older kids came with friends, my Liz of the West came and spent an enchanted weekend with us. We had adventures of one sort or another. We made friends with Wayne, who lived in another apartment, a sweet-hearted drunk who sat in front of the complex and drank beer all day and who watered my plants when I was away.
Our time there ended. Our view of the Gulf was obstructed by the construction of new tall skinny houses that tourists rented. The children developed friendships and interests in town they were loath to leave. The island became more crowded. I probably began to feel guilty “wasting” so much time doing nothing but hanging out on the beach, sleeping on a futon with my feet in the canned goods, sitting on the roof of the building next door, listening to the cicadas as they chorused their deafening song from one tree to the next until the song had encircled the entire island as the sun set, painting the sky and water with rosy gold and the moon rose, as my heart opened to a sort of joy it could never have been opened to if Sue’s death hadn’t broken it in two.
Looking back, I see that those summers, especially the first, had as much to do with who I am now as almost anything. And as I am writing this, on a yellow legal tablet, sitting beside the water, knowing that I am going to send these words out into the universe via a phone line and a computer, I am amazed.
Listen- there is nothing that is meaningless. There is nothing that involves water and air and children and words and sorrow and joy that is a waste of time.
And I still love Jimmy Buffett who managed to get me off my sorrowful ass and made me sing with my children in the warm green waters of the Gulf, our heads in the air universe, our bodies in the water universe, surrounded no doubt by the great fish and smiling dolphins. They were there. We couldn’t always see them.
But they were there.

Island Mysteries

I am sitting on a porch with a slight breeze coming from the west, the water in front of me blue, but also green where the sandbar lies close to the surface, not unlike the colors on a globe, approximating what the earth looks like from space. I love sitting on this porch, watching the changes in the bay as the day goes from morning to afternoon, to evening, to night.
It seemed to take forever yesterday to get here. First one small crisis, then another, before we could leave. Finally we were packed and on the way but we had to stop in Medart for gas and coffee and then we stopped in Panacea for shrimp, right down the road from where I lived a long, long time ago with other crazy hippies in a falling-down house which was where I was living when I realized I was pregnant with my first child. That was a strange time in my life and one where I was as mystified and in despair as I have ever been, not knowing what steps I could possibly take to go from that sort of a life to a life where I could be a good mother.
That house had been at the beginning of a path and here I was, not a half mile away, so much further down it.

When we pulled up to the seafood place, another car pulled up at the same time and a woman got out of her car wearing a long skirt, a black shirt that showed friendly cleavage, and cute little sandals with tiny kitten heels.
“I think that’s Connie May Fowler,” I told my husband and he said, “Really?”
“I do,” I said.
When we all got up to the porch of the seafood place, the seafood people greeted her, “Miss Connie! How are you?” and I knew it was her for sure.
My husband stuck his hand out and said, “Hey. We live in your old house.”
And we do. My beloved house in Lloyd was hers before her divorce and we bought it from her ex-husband. She and I have spoken a tiny bit via e-mail and I introduced myself to her and she was charming and said, “So nice to meet, not in cyberspace.”
We chatted for a moment about how her next book has that house as a character in it. She’d told me this in an e-mail about a year ago, and since then, I've had curiosity about how this book will turn out and also a small and unworthy bit of resentment because it's my house now, that beautiful old place beneath the oaks.
But listen- I know that a writer will use any damn thing she wants in her work because every thing and every one is part of the stuff of the art she makes.
In fact, her telling me about using the house in a book last year is what prompted me to start my own book about a frustrated wanna-be writer who is living in a house that a “real” writer used to live in and who is writing about it.
Fiction upon fiction, dancing with truth, all living in the same house- these things get crowded and complicated.
The book’ll be done by fall,” she said and what I didn’t tell her is that with any luck, the first draft of my book (Worst Novel Ever Written) will be done this weekend. No threat to the success of her book, anyway.
We got our shrimp and left, saying good-bye, and I said to stop by any time she wanted, in Lloyd, but I doubt she ever will. The house has become part of her past in essence of reality and part of her future in essence of fiction and it takes a long time to get from one place to another and it hardly ever pays in circumstances like that to backtrack, or so it seems to me.
It had been nice to meet her, finally, after reading her books, after living in her house. She looked exactly the way I thought she would, exactly the way an author should- pretty and smart and a little bit Bohemian. A woman with her own style, a woman with charm and perfectly painted toenails.
I wonder, though, if she looked at me and thought, “What is this woman doing, living in that house, under those oak trees?”
I was wearing overalls, and not the cute linen kind but blue denim ones that I’d put on that morning to pick the garden in and had never taken off. The kind that prompted a man at the dock on the island to ask me in a deep Georgia accent, “You a farm girl?”
“Yes,” I answered him, after some consideration. “Yes I am.”
It seemed as true as anything I know.
But then again, I’m on an island where it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between what is land, what is air, what is sea, and even if you can, it's changing all the time as the tide rises and falls, all under the mysterious pull of the moon as it travels around us, as the water is pulled into the air by the sun as we move around it.
It’s all so mysterious, this pulling and tugging, this constant changing from one thing to another, our very essence being transformed all the time.
I feel it now, this mysterious process, and I use words to try and define it like the sea uses waves to define the shore, one of us far more successful than the other in its task.
Can people change their essence the way water can change into air? Can mothers become writers, can writers become mothers? What sun is it that pulls us from one form to another, one path to another?
I have no idea and I hear thunder now, rolling from the west, and I will probably sit here and think about it all, watching the bay change, watching the day change, and I will be changing too, but I am not sure how.

Island, Ahoy!

All righty then. After we pack up everything we're going to need to eat, wear, drink, read and write on/with for the next four days and load it into the truck and the man gets the boat ready and we drive to Lanark and we load the boat and we make the small voyage to the island and unload the boat and load the Jeep and drive to the house and unload the stuff and put it all away and open up the house and open a beer, this is what I'll be looking at.
Phew!
Makes me tired just thinking about it, but that's okay because once we're there, it's all good.
Unless someone gets a rash or steps on a sting-ray or a piece of glass or something but I'm hoping none of that happens.
I plan to spend a lot of time reading, a fair amount of time napping, do some early-morning walks and watch a bunch of sunsets, weather permitting.
And I'm about to finish up writing what I can only describe as the World's Worst Novel but it will be DONE and then perhaps I'll start rewriting it or else I'll just take a deep breath and delete the entire motherfucking thing, but either way I'll have finished another book and that's something.
And we'll eat. In fact, I should be out there in that garden right this red hot second, picking lettuces and tomatoes and okra to take with us because I passed right through that produce section at Publix yesterday. We'll stop for shrimp in Panacea on the way down and I'm thinking the man will definitely catch us some fish and if not, I have canned beans.
I believe I have this dial-up modem thing figured out. We'll see.
And if I do, I'll post from the island, which will be really cool and if I don't, I'll catch up on Sunday.
Happy 4th, y'all. Have fun. Be safe and don't forget your sunscreen.

Another Miracle!

Hi. My name is Ms. Moon and I'm a hypochondriac. In fact probably one of the world's BIGGEST hypochondriacs.

This may come as a surprise to those who know me because I NEVER, EVER talk about all the various illnesses I am certain, at any given time, that I'm dying of.

Now the reason I don't discuss my many and varied terminal (and they're ALL terminal-believe me, I'm a nurse) illnesses is twofold:
1. If I talk about them, they may become real.
2. If I talk about them, someone might say, "Yeah. You should see a doctor about that."
And the problem with that is, my mental illness concerning doctors and the medical profession is even more extreme than the one where I think I have horrible diseases. I've had THAT neurosis my entire life and I have no idea why because I have no memory of ever being mistreated by a doctor in my childhood, although I do remember having to be held down by a nurse and my mother so that the doctor could give me a flu shot, and even two grown women had a difficult time keeping me still enough for the doctor to find his mark with the syringe.

Perhaps it's all related to needle terror but I don't think so because I'm not especially scared of needles any more. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that as a child my mother occasionally had to go to the hospital (where they have doctors in white coats who give people shots!) for pneumonia, leaving me and my brother in the care of people we didn't know in the slightest and didn't trust in the least and oh yeah, there was that time she was in the hospital and my dad was off on a drunk and there was no food in the house except potatoes and the poor lady who'd been hired to stay with us pleaded with me (a child of what? five? four?) to let her take me and my brother to her house where there was actual food but I refused because WHAT IF MY MOTHER COULDN'T FIND US WHEN SHE GOT OUT OF THE HOSPITAL!? NO, JUST COOK SOME MORE POTATOES!

But you know, I still love potatoes so I don't know if that's a valid theory.

And probably, my hypochondria is somehow related to that, too, but really, you're not being paid as a therapist so I'll stop talking about it.

Except to say that when I start obsessing about all the deadly tumors I'm sure are growing in my body, I know that I'm not mentally quite well. I do have enough self-awareness to realize that the hypochondria is a symptom, not a disease in and of itself.

And it's all part of this generalized anxiety I get sometimes which I've talked about before, which I hate because it's such a buzzy, busy, never-ending, no rest-in-sight sort of mind warp.

I'd been suffering this anxiety/dying-of-at-least-three-diseases thing for days now and nothing was helping. Not the St. John's Wort, not the walks, not the yoga, nothing. Yesterday I thought I might explode from it, it was so bad.

And then...
Mr. Moon, who had been out of town on business, got home last night and as soon as I got my arms around him, the symptoms ceased. Just like a light switch had been thrown. Oh, I've had a few traces of it since then, but they usually come when I'm about to get a hot flash and then they disappear as soon as I begin to cool down, so essentially, I AM HEALED.

Which is odd because I've never been the sort of wife or woman who's well-being depended on the presence of her husband. In fact, I love my times alone.

But that's what happened last night. I was worried quite literally to tears and I'd lost every bit of any shred of a sense of humor and I was practically tripping on my anxiety and then he pulled up into the yard, I went out to greet him, we held each other tight, and boom, done.

Now I know that I'll go through the whole damn thing again. It'll happen. And I'll chastise myself and I'll try to talk myself out of it because really, the oddest thing is that I am not afraid to die. Hell, I never thought I'd live this long. And I've been with people when they died and it was not scary but actually beautiful and peaceful and so natural that it just doesn't seem like something to be afraid of. Although of course, what I'm really afraid of is that I'll have to go to a doctor who will want to see what's going on with my internal organs and get tests and shots and X-rays and MRI's and CT scans and more shots and the doctor will stand there with my folder open, my entire life and fate written in codes and numbers and values and he'll be afraid to look me in the eyes to tell me what all these numbers and values and codes mean and it'll really suck.

But for now, today, this minute, I'm not worried.

I know I'm dying in the sense that every one is dying from the moment of birth but I also know I'm alive and feeling pretty well and I'm not apt to have to see a doctor today.

And I wish with all my heart that by this point in my life I'd not be so crazy. So inclined to just go off into a sort of insanity which I feel I have no control over whatsoever, but just have to ride out and deal with until it's over.

Like labor.

Except instead of getting a beautiful new baby when it's over, I just regain the ability to function without constant fear which, in a way, means I've gotten my life back and so maybe I've given birth (once again!) to myself.

Which is a process I seem to have to go through over and over and over again.

And here I am now, the world as green as it can be, the crickets thrilling me with their trilling, the sun spilling like gold into patches of light in the backyard and leaking into my heart, which is open and happy again.

Healed, perhaps by love, perhaps by holding on to the sanest thing I know, which is a man who was crazy enough to marry me which I know makes no sense but is just one of those mysteries of life for which I am almost unbearably grateful.

Now, Back To Business

So back when I was still a hopeful young sprout and capable of things like researching agents and sending out query letters and so forth, I learned a lot. Mostly what I learned is that if you want to get a book published, you should write a book on how to get a book published.
Because obviously, everyone in the whole damn world has written a book and wants to see it in print. And then of course, up on the big screen. Starring Will Smith and Angelina Jolie.
Or in my case, Ashley Judd and, well, I never did figure out who the dude character would be played by.
I wanted to play the mama.
The first agent query letter I sent out was to a woman agent I'd actually seen speak. So I wrote my pathetic and humble little I-am-no-one-and-my-book-probably-sucks-but-wouldn't-you-like-to-see-it letter to her.
Frankly, I had two problems.
One, the theme of the letter was I am no one and my book probably sucks and the other was that I sent this query out about one week after 9/11 and the agent's office was in NYC.
Yep. I did.
And the letter I got back from her wasn't even addressed to me and got the title of my book wrong.
So I learned a few things.
After awhile, my query letters got better and I started getting REAL letters back from agents that sounded, if not exactly enthusiastic, at least slightly more positive. A few asked to see the manuscript. And so it went.
As I gained a little bit of confidence, I started having more fun with my query letters. I mean, why the hell not?
And the one that I finally wrote that actually got a LOT of attention, and finally an agent, although that didn't work out so well, was bizarrely over the top. For your amusement, I will copy part of it here.

Thanks for listening.

"From the pen of the newest undiscovered author comes a blockbuster read! In the tradition of Connie May Fowler, Lee Smith, Fannie Flagg and Rebecca Wells, Mary Moon has given us another salty, strong and vibrant Southern woman to love. In her first novel, The Yearning Heart of Apalachicola Rose, Ms. Moon has created a character with heart and soul who learns just how strong and capable she is when her husband, a no-good pretty boy truck-driver named Billy, leaves her and their four children one beautiful spring morning to go and live with his new love, a woman in Oklahoma, leaving Rose with nothing but a shattered heart, a broken dream, and a six-pack of Budweisers in the refrigerator. After Rose drinks the beer, cuts her hair, and cries on her red-headed mama’s shoulder, she realizes that she cannot afford the luxury of wallowing in misery and so, like Scarlett O’Hara faced with the coming of the Yankees, Rose cuts down her curtains and makes a dress!
No! She doesn’t do that at all!
She gets on with her life and despite the fact that she has only a high-school education and a part-time job as a waitress, she manages to support and nurture her little family, survive the terrible Florida heat and: her gossiping small town neighbors, a major hurricane and the passes of an oysterman with very few teeth! This little Southern gal has spunk!
And then, into Rose’s backyard and life walks Raymond- a man with a beard! A man with a motorcycle! A man with a past! A man who knows how to decorate! Despite that, he really is “all man” and this all-man teaches Rose what love is all about! From their first lusty encounter under a full moon on the deserted white sands of beautiful St. George Island to the fulfilment of their passion in Raymond’s futon, Rose and Raymond are destined to be together!
But are they? Will Billy come back and reclaim the woman that he believes to be his and his alone? Will Rose succumb to Billy’s old charm and fall back into the life that she now knows is empty and false?
These and many other questions (including- will Rose get kicked out of the state of California for not knowing what Tofutti is?) will keep you reading long after your regular bedtime.
A full set of real characters accompany Rose on her journey to happiness. Black and white, gay and straight, Rose’s friends and family are there with her, every step of the way, making sure that the picturesque town of Apalachicola is populated in a colorful and amusing way.
Ms. Moon writes with passion and with authority. The reader cannot help but think, “By golly! Here’s a new voice with passion and authority!” From page one, to page last, this is a book. A real book. Read it and laugh. Read it and cry. Read it and remember what it is that we read books for! “Made me restart my book club!” Oprah “Gave me the strength to carry on!” Bill Clinton “Made me want to be a Southern woman!” Norman Mailer “Inspired my newest album!” Bob Dylan “Made me want to go back and work at the Dairy Queen again!” Anna Nicole “Laughed so hard I broke a rib and couldn’t do yoga for a month!” Madonna “Cried so hard that I had to get my Botox redone!” Anonymous

Okay. Do you see how desperate and insane the trying-to-get-an-agent process will make you?
I believe I've proved my point.

Not Much But It's What I've Got. Today. Now.

I just want to say that I got more visitors to my site yesterday than I have ever gotten in a day.
I don't know if this is because I threw my novel idea out there or if it's because I was nominated for "best crazy mother story" on The Newborn Identity website. (Tasty readin' there, folks.)
I'm thinking it's the Newborn Identity website.
Anyway, today's one of the those days where I think my own children could win a contest like that, quite easily.
And that's all I have to offer today, or right now, anyway, and must go shower because I'm going to lunch with a friend who just got divorced. This is not a celebration, it is an honoring of a passage into a different existence.
And I feel a deep need today, right this second, to give us all a very, very heartfelt bless our hearts and also to thank every one who made suggestions about my novel finding its way into the world and keep those ideas coming in, folks. I am considering them all.
Much love....Ms. Moon

Just Wondering

As I have said before, I have written a novel. I've written lots of parts of other novels, but one which is complete and for which I found an agent who helped me edit it but she never sold it. The book is set in Apalachicola, Florida, and is about a waitress named Rose.

I had originally titled the book The Yearning Heart of Apalachicola Rose, but the agent advised me that that sounded too Romance Novelish, so she wanted me to change it to just plain old Apalachicola Rose so I'm not really sure what the title is.

I am thinking (seriously, just thinking) about putting it up in the form of a blog. Not this blog. It would be another. And it would possibly be serialized. A chapter at a time or so. Maybe just a certain number of pages a week.

I'm just tossing ideas around.

And I'd like to see if I could actually make a teeny bit of money in the process. Now, I'm not sure how that would work. Quite possibly, I'd just go with ads on the site. Yes, shameful, but hellfire, I spent years writing that novel and years rewriting it and why not?
So what I'm asking here is, does this sound crazy? Would anyone be interested in it?
Should I post a few pages, see what sort of feedback I get?
Any suggestions?

And who knows? I might get back into this book and just re-start the damn, excruciating process of trying to find a different agent.

I don't know what I'm doing, obviously, but right now I'm just throwing ideas in the air and seeing where they land.


And to give credit where credit is due, please click here to go to the web site of Richard Bickel who took that beautiful photograph.

Power Outage

It's eleven thirty in the morning and the afternoon storm is rolling in ahead of schedule. The sky is growing dark and the thunder is booming to the southwest. The breeze has gotten ahold of the leaves, fluttering them like a man thumbing the edge of a stack of thin paper.

The birds are quiet and here it comes, as I write this, the rain, soft velvet sound of it as it falls.

The cake is out of the oven, the birthday breakfast long made, eaten, and those dishes washed. There were bacon and biscuits and eggs and sliced tomatoes. We ate outside where now the tablecloth is getting soaked.

Here comes the rain, hard, no more velvet, and my big dog, Pearl, is trying to crawl up into my lap. She's always hated storms. I put my hand on her back and she is shaking like the leaves outside on the wisteria. The weather moves us all, one way or another.

Fifteen minutes later and the storm has almost passed, taking our electricity with it. Shit. I have a party to make, bread to mix up in the Kitchen Aid, okra to cut and fry, green tomatoes to do the same, an Afghani eggplant dish from last night to heat up, the bread to bake.

Here in Lloyd, our electricity goes out with great regularity. Sometimes it comes back on in an hour or so, sometimes it takes much longer. So many long lines of power, so many trees with branches ready to fall, ready to brush and interrupt our service. Jefferson County is big- the only county in the state that stretches from Georgia to the Gulf, and most of that big empty space, just trees and a few arteries of roads, paved to dirt, from heart to distant farm yard.

Another bolt of lightening, another deep powerful peal of thunder. The kind you feel in your chest. Pearl looks around, her old white eyebrows raised in worry and wonder.

I go plug in the old fashioned, non-electric phone that works miraculously, even without power. I call Progress Energy, who controls our power in this neck of the woods. I enter my phone number and of course, the first thing the human asks me for when she comes on the line is that same number.

Yes, the outage has been reported. Yes, they are working on it. A repair time is estimated for 2:30. The party is supposed to begin at three. Thank-you for using Progress Energy.

It's not her fault; I am resigned, not angry. Who could I be angry at? It is an act of God.
Which God, I am not sure.
Thor, perhaps.

Kurt Vonnegut would say, "And so it goes."
Annie Hall would say, "La-di-dah."

I think that sums it up.

La-di-dah, so it goes.
Life goes on.

Birthday Musings

Well, tomorrow's the man's birthday and so far I have prepared for this event by doing...squat.
Okay. That's not entirely true. I did order him some shirts and a pair of flip-flops off the internet but there's not a chance in hell they'll arrive before tomorrow. I have to get all his clothes off the internet because he's too tall for regular sizes or, in the case of his feet, too big.
And you know what they say about big feet? Oh. You don't? Well, here it is:
Big feet, big....flip-flops.
They aren't kidding either.
His flip-flops are huge. You could take the rubber from one of his flip-flops, melt it down and use that rubber to make a tire for a Yugo. Or maybe two tires.
So anyway, I guess I have to go to town here in a while and find something in a store that I can give to him as a birthday present which is extremely stressful for me to contemplate. First off, because I probably won't find him a present in Publix which means I'll have to go to some other store, which is not part of my comfort zone, and secondly, because I don't have the slightest idea what this would be, this present.
I gave him like THREE things for Father's Day which was only two weeks ago and that about does it for my ability to buy presents for this man.
Right now he's out in the garage doing something with his car. Before breakfast he'd already broken his floor jack and stabbed himself in the hand with a sharp tool of some sort so he's having a good day. Last night he asked me how many push-ups I can do because he's going to need me to do some sort of car-holding-up while he's putting an exhaust system in today and so I'm not really looking forward to that. I mean, really. I can only do about four push-ups. How long could I possibly hold up an entire CAR?
I don't really think he needs me to hold up the car, although since he's broken the floor jack, maybe he does. I'll have to get some clarity on this situation but I'm sort of afraid to ask.
I know I need to go get the ingredients for a German Chocolate cake which is what he wants this year. The first year we were together on his birthday I made him a German Chocolate cake and I like that cake a lot and I don't mind making it. One year I was going to make him one but the dog ate the bar of German Chocolate before I got to the task and I freaked out because isn't chocolate supposed to be lethal to dogs?
Well, we all wish.
I bought another bar of chocolate and made the cake and then the dog got to THAT and ate half of it and yet, she still didn't die.
Once a friend of mine's dog ate a whole bunch of chocolate chip cookies and she, in a panic, called their vet and asked what she should do.
"Pour him a nice cold glass of milk," was the vet's professional suggestion.
So there. Once my small dogs got into some dark-chocolate covered espresso beans and I will say that that combination will keep your dogs up all night long and the phrase bouncing off the walls is not just metaphorical.
But I am procrastinating here because I don't want to go to the store(s) OR hold up a car with my very strong arms but as I have said before, I love this man and I am more than happy and grateful to celebrate his birthday with him again. I have celebrated his birthday with him for twenty-five years now and I can't even believe that as I type it but yes, it's true.
And I remember when we met and we were both twenty-nine, how old and worn out I felt, having two children already and having been married and divorced and was halfway through nursing school. I think now I was more exhausted than old and not even started in the process of being worn-out.
Today I definitely feel old and worn-out but I am hoping that in another twenty-five years I'll look back at this year and think, "Jeez. I was a spring chicken, full of vim, vigor and really good-looks," and I'll be making this man a cake of some sort.
I still won't know what to get him for his birthday but maybe his car will be restored by then and we'll take a drive, our antique gasoline powered engined car a relic that we'll have to buy gasoline for on e-bay because all of our cars will be powered with grits at that point. Or water or fingernail peelings or German Chocolate cake crumbs.
We'll be wearing white scarfs and the top will be down and I'll sing him happy birthday in my wavery old-woman voice as we cruise over the highways in our powerful car and hopefully, if it breaks down, he'll have a jack that works and I won't have to hold it up for him because I'll probably only be able to do two push-ups at that point but if he asks me to I'll try.
Because I love him.
From the top of his head to the bottom of his huge feet, I love that man.

Paper Bag Full Of Assumptions

It's Friday and I'm still alive. It's been a strange week for me, being half-ill, half not. I feel as if I've had "Flu-Lite" which is far better than Flu For Real, but it's still been disconcerting and I don't know how to be sick.

I still don't feel quite great, but did take a walk this morning, a little slower than usual (but I was still passing young, strong men and that is the truth) and I saw something that might have been a fox, running through tall grass, or might have been a cardinal, flying straight through, and isn't that the way? We think our eyes are so honest and so truthful and maybe they are but the trouble begins when the brain kicks in to interpret what it is the eyes are reporting and I have learned in my years never to trust my eyes completely. The other night at dusk, I saw what I thought was a chicken in my back yard, shuffling around on the ground, until suddenly it took off with great whooshing wings to fly to the top of the Chinaberry tree and I realized it was an owl, which is a completely different sort of fowl indeed.

But my eyes saw large-bird-on-ground and my brain made the most reasonable assumption, which was that I was looking at a chicken and there you have it.

We should not make assumptions.

My daughter assumed this morning that when she went into the bathroom at 5:45 a.m. to get ready for work that she would be alone in there but she was wrong. There was a baby bat and she freaked out, as would I, and her daddy had to get it out. The bat assumed that when he fell out of the chimney he would know where he was and what he was doing but he was wrong about that, too.

I am sighing, assuming that since there was one lost baby bat in the house, I will soon be finding more. I hope I am wrong.

When I started this blog, I assumed that no one would read it. This was based on the fact that no one seemed to be interested in most of the stuff I wrote and sent out for possible publication but I was wrong. Some people have read it. My (totally accurate, I assume) hit counter turned over to the 10,000 mark yesterday and I am amazed, even if half those hits came from this computer.

Of course the hottest new blogger in the world (I assume), Black Hockey Jesus, has gotten ten thousand hits in his first thirty days- he told us! so my pitiful ten thousand in a year is pretty pathetic, but you know what? I don't care. Ten thousand is ten thousand whether it takes you fifteen minutes (Dooce, I'm sure), or a month, or a year. Or ten years! Whatever!

I'm more than blown away.

I also assumed, when I started blogging, that I'd run out of things to talk about, which has proved to be untrue as well. It would seem that I have more things to say than I could possibly have imagined. Of course, most of them are trite or hardly worth saying and definitely not really worth reading, but the joy I get in saying them is worth it all to me.

Or maybe it's just an addiction and I just think it's a joy, but that's okay too.
It's keeping me out of the pool halls and the local psyche ward and for that I am grateful.

My daughter, Ms. Maybelle, has posted her first blog and I do not assume, I KNOW, that she is going to swiftly garner a large reading audience because this girl is good. She is springing forth, fully formed, as a writer because in all probability she has written more words in her life than I have because she has been journaling constantly and faithfully since she was a tiny girl, her pencil fisted in her hand, filling up one notebook after another (where do you KEEP all those journals, May?) with her words. Her blog site is called Roll Up The Rugs and I advise you to go there and dance on the bare floor with her. You won't regret it.

Of course my son passed me the crack pipe when he got me started in blogging. We are writers, all of us, in that we are compelled to write and then compelled to share it.

The picture above is of a summer plox blooming in my office yard. It is the daughter of a seedling I brought with me from my old yard and that was given to me by my then neighbor. Plants like this phlox are so adaptive and so prolific that they beg to be passed around and so it is with writers and their words which is why we are all adapting to this blog thing so beautifully. We're like the phlox on good days, or perhaps on bad days like the armadillos that got loose from their cages in the traveling circus and are now to be found on every road in the south, flattened and oozing or perhaps lying with all four little paws stretching straight up into the sky.

And on the good phlox days I can blog so prettily and tie everything up in pretty paper and finish it off with a bow but on the bad armadillo days I just hand you a paper bag full of stuff and say here, go through this, if there's anything you can use, take it, throw the rest out.

And that's me today with paper bag in hand, feeling guilty because I came to the party without wrapping my present but here's my crumpled up bag. I think Ms. Maybelle's blog might fit you and I'm pretty sure Downtown Guy has something to say that you can use.
Throw the rest out.

And try not to step on the armadillo. Do not assume he is dead. He may be only seriously napping.

Olden Times

I was reading the obits this morning, which is something I sometimes do. Not to see if anyone I know has died so much as to just acknowledge people's lives and passing and this morning I noticed that a woman had died whom I did not know, but I had known her father and reading her obituary brought back memories of him.
His name was McKinley Smith, Sr., although we all knew him as Smitty.
Smitty was a older black gentlemen who had a jook joint out in what used to be the boonies but which is now a high-dollar area of North Leon County, out on Bannerman Road. This was in the early 1970's and I'm not sure how Smitty and the local hippies formed an alliance but they did. One of the things about "those days" that I still don't quite understand is how all of a sudden (it seemed to me, anyway) black folks and white folks were interacting in ways that had previously been unheard of and by God, I'm claiming some of that action to be due to the hippies and our hippie ways. If there was anything hippies stood for besides good music and the right to go barefoot and smoke dope, it was that all the old societal rules should be kicked to the curb until further notice. And this included any bullshit about separation of the races. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that we were the first generation of kids who'd gone to integrated schools. Maybe it had something to do with all those rock bands playing old blues tunes and bringing the blues masters to the public eye. B.B. King, in his amazing autobiography which should be required reading in American high schools, gave credit to the hippies for making his career explode. Which goes back to kicking all the rules to the curb. Music was being made that had its roots everywhere and anywhere and there was an audience for it. Country, blues, folk, opera, soul- all these genres and more were mined and refined into newly minted music and along with all of that, I think people started paying attention and realizing that there was a lot of respect due where none had been given before and that differences were more interesting than something to fear.
Or something like that. I might be talking through my hat.
Anyway, Smitty had that jook joint out on Bannerman and he gladly let the local musicians make his club their home. There was even a band formed called Smitty's Band and I truly wish I could remember who all made it up.
The club itself was mostly one big room built on to a smaller section where Smitty himself lived and there was a kitchen in the back. There was a bar and there was a stage and there were tables. There was also a big wooden dance floor where hippies and hippie kids and black folks would dance but my favorite dancer was Smitty himself who would get his thin old bones in his neat buttoned-up shirt and his khaki pants out on the floor and do a sort of closed-eye shuffle that somehow hypnotized me. He loved the music. I don't know if he loved the hippies, but he tolerated us and we knew that if people were smoking dope in the parking lot, no one was going to call the cops.
The people who were developing Killearn at one point offered Smitty a million dollars to sell them his land. Now back in the seventies, a million dollars was an awful lot of money but he refused their offer.
"Where would I feed my pigs?" I distinctly remember him saying.
Nah. Smitty had everything he wanted. He had acres of beautiful land where his pigs could graze (and where several hippie weddings were performed) and he had his small, comfortable living quarters and he had his own club where bands would play music so he could dance. He always seemed to have a "niece" from up north living with him, too, and he seemed like a reasonably happy man to me.
My ex-husband and I used to drive out to see Smitty on Sunday's sometime. We'd buy a beer and sit and talk to him. Sometimes he'd get a watermelon out of the cooler and cut it up and we'd all sit around and eat that sweet cold fruit. I remember once we went out when our oldest was a little over a year old and he told us not to wait too long to have another. I forget what his reasoning was, but we must have listened to him because our next baby came along before the oldest was two.
I don't know if Smitty was wise or if he was just someone we thought was wise because he was old and black and had turned down an offer for a million dollars in order to maintain a relatively simple lifestyle that suited him but we respected him and he didn't treat hippies like they were second-class citizens, but just real people, like him, and it felt like we had a lot in common, despite all the glaring differences between us.
I remember when Smitty died. I went to his funeral, as many other hippies did. It was my first country funeral in a black church and there were indeed electric guitars and a lot of ladies in hats fanning themselves. I cried and a young man in a suit standing next to me handed me a starched white handkerchief and I'll never forget that.
They buried Smitty in the front yard of his club and the last time I was out that way, I stopped. The place had turned into some sort of restaurant and there was a little fence around Smitty's grave but no marker that I could see and that made me sad.
Thinking about a lot of things from those old days make me sad. We had such hope that things would change. Things like transcending differences between people based on race and age and upbringing and culture. Things like Smitty's club.
Maybe we're about to get our first black president and the ways of this world will take another halting jolt forward. God, I hope so. I wish Smitty were still around to see this possibility. I think he'd be proud.
I think he would have been proud of his daughter, too. She was too young to die- only 57- but I see by her obit that she'd done more than well by herself. She got a Master's Degree from FSU and was the budget director for the Department of Education Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.
My ex husband and I actually lived on Bannerman road for one long, hot summer before we ever had any children and Smitty's sister had a little jook of her own, two doors down from the house we rented and we used to go in there for fried chicken sandwiches. She was a sweet woman and I used to visit her now and then but I haven't for a long, long time. Still, the last time I went, it had been twenty years since I'd lived there and she knew who I was. She recognized me and hugged me hard. Other people in the club recognized me too. "You that white girl, used to be married to Jerry," they said.
Yep. That's me.
I'm that white girl, used to be married to Jerry. Used to dance at Smitty's Club. Used to think things were changing.
Maybe I still do. Not the way I used to when it seemed like all kinds of changes were happening overnight. Wars ending, presidents getting kicked out of office. Stuff like that.
Stuff that ought to be happening now, but isn't.
Anyway, I just wanted to say all of that. Pay a little tribute to people who have gone on, and to hippie ways and hippie hope and places like Smitty's club where people came together to make music and dance and laugh, despite differences.
Yeah. I just wanted to say that.
I wish I had a picture of Smitty or even his club to put here, but I don't. So this post is going pictureless. Just close your eyes and imagine a hot, small, smoky club, lit only by Christmas lights and neon beer signs, a thin old black man holding a beer, dancing with his eyes closed, little kids and their parents dancing around him, all sorts of folks sitting together at tables, drinking a little beer, getting a little buzz, happy to be alive in such good, colorful, musical, hopeful times while outside the crickets are buzzing and the moon is rising over fields where pigs are grazing, everyone happy.
Try to imagine that.
If you want to. If you can.

Plan To Keep The Tourist Industry At Bay

My beloved local NPR station has recently taken to including the "heat index" in its daily weather prognostications.
I wish they'd stop that.
We here in muggy, hot north Florida KNOW what 97 degrees with 99% humidity feels like. Please don't tell us that with the heat index it will feel like 108.
My prediction:
Keep this up and we'll all just kill ourselves.

And Speaking of Intelligence....

I just can't let the passing of George Carlin go unremarked.

In my idea of heaven, he and St. Richard Pryor are sitting at the right hand of god and god is cracking UP! He is laughing so hard his holy side is splitting. The angels are getting concerned because they haven't seen him laugh this hard since George W. Bush got elected as president. Well, the first time. By the second, god was only silently weeping.

But anyway, god is laughing now.

I only hope that somewhere an incredibly smart baby is being born who will grow up to be as irreverent, intelligent, courageous and fucking funny as these two men were because honey, this old world needs people like that.

Desperately.

How many times have I watched St. Carlin on film being completely blown away? Not only by his humor but by his incredibly unbelievable intelligence?

Too many to count.

I don't care if he was stoned or drugged up or sick or old- that man never lost it. He had the mind of a steel trap and the heart of a lion. He was a master word-smith and he used words like smart bombs. He dropped them and they did their work. They made us think, they made us laugh, they made us look at ourselves. He wasn't afraid to take on patriotism, the FCC, the pope or the president. He opened the doors and windows of the houses where all the sacred cows live and he said, "Come on in! Does this look as absurd to you as it does to me?"

And hell yes, it did.

In his honor, please let me say this:

Fuck, George! You scared the piss out of a lot of people but you were funny as shit when you did it. You weren't afraid to call a cunt a cunt or a cocksucker a cocksucker and you never, not once in your motherfucking life stopped believing that it was your job to point out all the stupid cocksucking, motherfucking shit that we crazy humans believe and do and continue to believe and do, no matter how obvious it is that it's all a big pile of shit.

You rocked, George. You were human and you made mistakes but you weren't afraid to tell us about them and you weren't afraid to show your humanity and thus allow us to honor our own. You inspired us all and you changed the world with your mind and that's fucking more than most of us ever will do.

And oh yes, you could charm the tits off us.

Love...Ms. Moon

P.S. Please give Richard our love if you and he have somehow managed to get tossed onto the same roof.

And Some Designs Are More Intelligent Than Others

I seem to be thinking about religion a lot lately and I know I write about it a lot, especially in the sense of I don't believe it, any of it but I do know that a lot of really fine people do, like Jimmy Carter or the lady who works in the post office here who is Jehovah's Witness. The Witnesses do not believe in celebrating Easter or Christmas but Miss M. will call you on Christmas Eve if a package has come in that she knows you've been hoping would arrive before Christmas because she's just sweet that way.

She came to my house once with two beautiful grandchildren to witness, and because she's Miss M. and so sweet and I know her, I couldn't blow her off the way I usually do these people but I said, "You know, M., I've got my own very strong feelings about religion and spirituality and maybe you should spend time with someone else who might be more open to your message," and she said, "Oh Mary. I love that about you. That you're so honest."

And you know what? I think she meant that. I don't think she was being snarky or sarcastic or anything but truthful and I love her too. I know her heart and it is good.

She doesn't need me to bless it.

And that's what I wonder about- why do we need religion?

This brings up Anne Lamott, an author I really do love. Not her fiction so much, but her essays. I just finished reading her book entitled Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and I loved it, even though she's sort of eat up with the Jesus thing. She truly admits that her faith in Jesus is so simple that the five and six-year olds she teaches in Sunday School get everything she believes about Jesus. The first thing I read by her was her book Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year which was so honest and so heartbreakingly true for anyone who's ever had a child that I just fell in love with her. She's a recovering alcoholic who admits to every sort of bad behavior and bad thoughts and bad everything but who is constantly trying to do better with the help of god and the person she occasionally calls "Uncle Jesus" which sort of cracks me up and sort of makes me want to hurl something at her.

But how can I hate anyone who writes things like, "I am the piece of shit the world revolves around" or who admits to having had abortions and who believes passionately that every woman has the right to choose and who not only believes in euthanasia but who actually helped a dying friend choose the time and manner of his own death? And then wrote about it?

I mean really.

This is not the sort of Jesus Freak I've known and if she believes that Jesus is helping her (and she does!) every step of the way, who am I to try and pull that rug out from beneath her?

Not my job.

But it reminds me of a group I used to go to of sexual abuse survivors and so many of the women gave god the glory for their ability to heal and go on with their lives, making sure that the chain of abuse had been broken in their families and I always wanted to shout at them, "Give yourself the credit! You're the one who did it! You're the one doing it! Not god. And by the way, where was god when you were a little child being abused?"

But again, I never did.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I wish with all my heart I had some sort of belief for when times get hard. I worry too much and I get anxious and I have problems and so do people I love. I wish I had a faith, not in what Anne Lamott calls God's Magic Wand (which she doesn't think he has) but in the sort of rightness of it all that she does believe in. That every bump in the road, every mistake we make, every wrong turn we take, every grief and hardship and sorrow will somehow lead us to a place of light if we just let go and trust in god.

As I've said before, I honestly think there's a gene that determines faith, whether in god, country, or even a team. And I don't have it.

What I do have is a belief that really, we all should try and help each other out as much as possible. That we should try and do the right thing because, well, I have no idea why. Probably because evolution has made me that way. Just as it has probably made it so that many people do have the gene to band together for many reasons because many are more powerful than an individual and all sorts of things can be accomplished if a lot of people come together for one purpose, whether it's to grow food or hunt or defend a territory or a gene pool.

That's what makes sense to me.

And to those people, like Anne Lamott, who protest that they alone without the grace of Jesus or Mohammad or Yahweh or whatever god it is they believe in, could never, ever have found the strength to pull themselves up and out of hate or addiction or affliction or whatever, I say, How do you know? How do you know it hasn't been you and your very own personal grace and strength and light all along? Because the fact of the matter is, no matter who you believe is running the show, you're the one up there saying the lines, you're the one up there doing the work. Not god. Not Jesus. You. You're the one who is acting in grace, making the choice to love and forgive and be strong. You.

Why is it so hard to take the credit for all the good you do when it's so easy to take the blame for all the bad?

I don't know. I have no answers and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or witty or a smart ass today. I'm being honestly bewildered.

I think I can be as amazed at the glories around me as any person of any faith and I don't need to praise a god to be so. On the other hand, I don't have to come up with excuses for that same god when things aren't so glorious, which is some small comfort, I guess.
I don't have to go to the Bible and pick out the parts I think are good and dismiss the parts I don't. I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what god or Jesus REALLY meant when they said or did such-and-such.

And now I think I will go partake of the glory of the blackberries. And I will wonder why there are thorns and then I'll remember it's the way the plant has evolved to protect it from being picked by animals like me when birds, who are not bothered by the thorns, will spread its seeds so much farther and more efficiently.

Or at least that's my theory.

And I think it's as good as any and if you believe that god made those thorns on blackberries for us to prove our worthiness to eat them or something in that vein, well, that's not going to detract at all from the pleasure I get in eating the ones I've picked, all the while cursing the thorns but respecting the plant and the process of evolution, meanwhile slapping mosquitoes which, I have to say, are proof enough in my book that there is no such thing as intelligent design, but which are tasty indeed to the birds.

Yes I Can Can (But I Choose Not To. Today, Anyway)

Well, here is Sunday, late afternoon and we've had a rain shower and Mr. Moon and the youngest child are off to the movies and I'm still a bit under the weather, although as you can see from the picture above I have been eating my fair share of tomatoes.
That was an eggplant and squash casserole with tomatoes on top. I made it last night because the garden will not stop making eggplant and squash. Or tomatoes, actually.
That's the thing about a garden. It's all or nothing.
All winter long you yearn for a real tomato, one just picked and still warm from the sun which has nurtured it into red tomato goodness and then finally it's spring and you plant your tomatoes and you water them and you give them yummy meals of chicken shit to encourage their growth and then at long last, the baby green tomatoes appear and your heart bursts with joy and you protect your baby tomatoes as they grow and finally! one is ready to pick and you pick it, you do! and it's so good and it's a celebration and a joy, that first tomato, dripping with its sweet, salty juices and life is so good.
And then, there are more tomatoes and you are even more joyful! Tomatoes! You will feast on tomatoes! You will eat them on sandwiches and in salads and you will eat them standing over the sink or in fresh tomato pasta or cut up on casseroles and no matter what you do, you cannot keep up with the tomatoes and before you know it, you are drowning in tomatoes and there is nowhere in the kitchen to put down a cutting board because every surface is drowning in ripe, red goodness.
And still, the garden calls- more tomatoes! ready for the picking! Bring your basket, your biggest basket! We are ready and ripe for you!
And you just think, Oh dear. Oh my. What have I done?
And the same is true for the squash and the eggplant and it was true for the snow peas, although they're done now.
But to be frank, the cucumbers and the green beans are doing nothing, nothing I tell you, just vining up and being green and not making vegetables to speak of, which is a disappointment.
There have been years when I got out the canning jars and the canning kettle and the jar lifter and the salt and the vinegar and the spices and I have made pickles, oh my lord, have I made pickles. The dill, the sweet, the ones so sweet it takes three weeks and an antique ceramic vessel to make them because it takes all of three weeks and antique vessel magic to exchange every cucumber molecule for sugar molecules and I am not kidding you.
There is no candy on earth with as much sugar in it as those pickles so of course they are the family favorite.
They would be yours, too, if you tried them.
And I have canned tomatoes in past years and I have made my own ketchup and I have made my own salsa, as well and there is nothing on earth so satisfying as lifting the steaming jars from the kettle and setting them down on the counter and hearing that lovely "pop" as the lids suck in and you know you've done it right and then seeing all those jewel-like jars of tomatoes or pickles there- evidence of your tender garden nurturings, your kitchen labor love.
I may have been a Mormon in a former lifetime.
But today, probably because I am sick, and possibly because I am old, just the thought of sterilizing all those jars and lids and boiling the tomatoes and removing their skins, and the heat and the work- well, it just sort of makes me want to go crawl up in the bed and fall asleep with the fan blowing on my head.
Which is what I think I will do right now until my former-lifetime Mormonism passes and leaves me as I am today, a slightly ill, hotflashing woman of no particular belief at all, unless it is a belief in the goodness of gardening, the righteousness of the Mason Jar, the gratefulness for the overabundance of the tomatoes.

HOLY SHIT!!!!

I am sick. I believe I have the hoopacoodis, which is what my mother called any illness involving cold or flu-like symptoms. There were four of us kids and we frequently had the hoopacoodis and when we did, we were always dosed with "red medicine" which I believe was some sort of cough syrup/decongestant and which was used so liberally in my household that it was bought by the quart in a brown industrial-strength looking bottle and was kept in a kitchen cabinet, the better to be handily available for instant dispensation.

Now this was in Winter Haven, Florida, which is right down the road from Lakeland, Florida, which is the location of some sort of big-ass revival going on called Florida Healing Outpouring. If you go to their website, which I just did, you will find a professional-looking movie that shows just how cool and amazing this revival is. You will also find plenty of ways to DONATE if God so moves you to do so.

This is not your run-of-the-mill revival, folks. No. They've got a fat, white, baldheaded, tattooed preacher who is regularly visited by angels. The dead are being raised. Twenty-four times so far! There's the case of the man who can now see through his glass eye! Which, they point out, is even more miraculous than if Jesus had given him a new, real eye. They also say they are miraculously giving people gold teeth via prayer and boy, do I wish I'd have gotten in on that one because my gold crowns cost a lot of money that I would much rather have spent on something else.

There are pages of testimony on the website, many of them offering heartfelt messages of healing like this actual one I just read:

i feel god is not only moving there, but i feel it has begun there!!! My mamaw has been miraculuosly healed!!!!! Praise GOD!!!!!!!!!!!

Well. Who could argue with that?

After spending several long moments perusing some of the many, many bits of film uploaded to YouTube from these revivals, I can only say that God obviously doesn't think obesity is a problem or he would be doing a bit more healing in that direction.

The website also offers a complete line of merch. You can buy books and music that will help you see the truth, understand the truth, and let you get lost in Jesus. I love that phrase, Lost in Jesus, don't you? I always thought you were supposed to get found in Jesus, but hey! lost, found, whatever. It's all about Jesus.

But you know, it's hard times. People can't afford health care and they're losing their houses, cars, jobs, and pensions. Every where we look, every where we turn, every thing we hear is about how things are bad and getting worse. The price of gas, the price of food, the cost of health care, the environment. So anyone with a message of hope and passion is bound to be popular.

Anyone who promises miracles is bound to get attention.

Sometimes I wish I wasn't such a cynical old woman. I wish I could believe in fat white preachers who are visited by angels and told what to cast out, what to cast in, and given the power to do it.
But I can't.

This is not to say I don't believe in miracles. I do. I believe in miracles but they're more the down-home, everyday ones like love and birth and death and rain and the raising up of the watermelons.

And that'll have to do for me. They're the miracles I can see and touch and hear and wonder at.

But you know, if I weren't such a cynical old woman, I'll bet I could go to that website, DONATE, and then put my hand on the computer and pray for a healing from the hoopacoodis and I would be healed.

Maybe not right away. Sometimes, according to testimony, it might take a week or so. That's probably what would happen to me. I'd have this bug for about a week and then it would go away, Hallalujah! praise the Lord, pass the remote control because I'm not the sort of person who can pray with any sense of anything but foolishness and who will, instead, take it easy for a few days, hanging out, reading books, napping, eating tomato sandwiches and watching old movies on the TV while my immune system does its job.

I expect a healing in seven days.
Even without red medicine. Even without a fat white tattooed preacher being involved.
Even without DONATING.

It's a miracle.

And The Horse You Were Hauling, Too

So this morning on my walk, I was at the part where I've been seeing the bear tracks but was bravely striding on, determined to work through my unreasonable bear-seeing anxiety when a truck pulling a horse-trailer came up the dirt road behind me.

I stepped aside so the truck could get by me and the woman driving stopped.

"Hey!" she said from the comfort of her air-conditioned truck with her cell phone to her ear. "You need a ride or are you just trying to get skinny?"

You know. I think I would have rather seen a bear.

Hellz A Poppin'!

You know, some people say life is like a journey and some people say life is like a dream but I say life is like trying to hold a barrel-full of ping pong balls under water with one hand.

Just when you think you've got all those merry, bouncing balls under control, they start popping up to taunt you.

Not that I EVER think I have anything under control but at least sometimes I feel like maybe I have a clue as to how I will eventually get things under control which is hysterically funny and patently untrue.

Our water is turned off right now because there's a plumbing leak and although Mr. Moon can fix it because he can fix anything, he can't always fix things right this second and today is an example of that. Since he's the solo breadwinner, he has to be there winning bread at his real job in town and here I sit, helpless and useless, not even able to do the monkey-work I usually do which is washing dishes and doing laundry, making me feel even more useless and helpless.

Also, the ominous noise my car has been making turned downright ugly this morning so I've driven it to the village car repair place (yes! we do have one!) which inspired great interest on the part of the three guys who work there because they've never worked on my particular type of car before. Despite the fact that they didn't know how to open the hood, I know they'll be able to figure it out because these guys are good. You should see all the grease on the computer keyboard in that office! Whoa!

I went walking today but just as I got to the part where I have been seeing the bear tracks, I heard something in the bushes (a bird, probably) which made me jump and turn around and go back the way I'd come because I'm just all of a sudden freaked out about this whole bear thing. It's like the time I was using the outhouse and I saw a snake at my feet at the exact second that a wasp stung my shoulder. I KNEW a wasp had stung me but for a microsecond the threat of snake bite and the reality of wasp sting blended together in my mind and if there was an award for adrenalin output, I would have won it that day.

So thinking about bears and hearing a noise in the bushes had a similar effect on me and although I didn't exactly bolt or scream like a girl, I did get a hot flash.

And I don't know. These are all very small ping pong balls. Tiny. But it seems like the giant balls (no pun intended) that make up the world's problems are more out of control than usual too and I can't do a damn thing about them. Our governor (I wonder if his balls are as tanned as the rest of him), who impressed us all despite the fact that he's a Republican with his initial speeches about the environment and the need to support education has gone all I-might-be-McCain's-running-mate on us and is hollering to open up drilling off our coast and there's the whole no-gay-marriage-amendment thing going on here in Florida and by God, I'm tired of people in Bagdad getting killed with my tax dollars.

And so forth. Floods, levees being breached, world-wide food shortages, unspeakable horrors happening all over the place, our stupid idiot president (who is one big ugly testicle as far as I can see) being let off his leash to actually speak in foreign countries ("You're looking good, your holiness!" "Maybe my rhetoric has caused people to think I'm not a man of peace," etc.) and well, okay, maybe I've had too much coffee today and anyway, yes, I'm on to the manic phase of my mental disorder. I wish it was the sort of mania where I feel like I can do and accomplish anything and then go out and buy eighteen pairs of shoes, but no, Ms. Moon just types away at nothing and then sweeps the house.

All right. I'm done.

I'm tired of worrying about all this shit and it's not helping anyway.

I can't fix fix the plumbing, I can't fix my car, I can't fix George Bush's brain or the Christian Right's homophobia or the levees. I can't even fix it so there aren't any bears where I want to walk.

I can fix lunch though and I think I will.

You gotta start somewhere.

One ping pong ball at a time, right?

And if you'd like to tell me what the nature of your out-of-control ping pong balls are, I'd love to hear about it. I'm blessing your heart in advance.

It's Not The Heat, It's The Humility

I think something's going around. Everyone seems crazy.
Or is it just me?
Yesterday was a day of just feeling damn good about being alive and feeling fine. No bipolar mania there, just the calm serenity and acceptance of a very good life.
Today I woke up, did basically the same things as yesterday, and yet I feel as if I have wasted my entire life.
What causes these changes in attitude?
Is it all just chemicals? Do the stars impel us, or perhaps even compel us? Is it the barometric pressure?
All I know is that I keep finding myself wishing I could be in Roseland, staying by myself at that little cabana house beside the mythical pool of my childhood dreams.
Oh! Just to sit on that dock with the Sebastian River flowing beneath me, the sun about to set, the water roiling as the fishes go about their frantic evening feeding, the great blue heron balanced regally on one leg on the sandbar, the clouds above me scudding across before a threatening storm, the bamboo playing a rattling, clattering music on the bank in the wind.
How can a place that's less than half-a-day's drive seem so far away? As unobtainable as a trip to the pyramids of Egypt?
I don't know, but if I were there, I would stand on that dock with my face to the wind and I would not stop watching until the night had swallowed all the light and I had somehow managed how to incorporate all of me into one piece of wholeness again.