Ham And Teachers

Well, beside the fact that none of the kids could out today except for Lily and Jason, it's been a pretty perfect Easter.
Here's what the food looked like.

And yes the greens were delicious and the frittata thing with the onions and peppers and potatoes and mushrooms and asparagus was just fine and the deviled (or as Ms. Rebecca says) Jesused eggs were terrific but oh my god...the ham and the pineapple casserole and the biscuits.

Chile, please. 

That pig was sanctified and bona fide. That casserole was sweet and cheesy and buttery and crunchy. And the biscuits were like little pillows of soft, warm heaven.

And no, I did not take the ham into the closet. There was plenty for all and in fact, my ham needs may be satisfied for another year. 

Eggs were hidden, hunted and found. 

And then two more warm ones, a brown and a blue, were discovered in the hen house. 

Bamboo jousting was enjoyed by Owen and his mama.

There was chick cuddling and goat-feeding and mule-feeding. 

And the men did the dishes. 

Pretty darn perfect. 

But here's another thing I want to talk about. This article was in the paper this morning.

We all had one, at least. A few if we were lucky. The teacher that made you hungry to learn. That made you want to do your best. That took an hour's lecture and turned it into the best hour of the day. That made it all come alive. 

That was Dr. Jones who is set to retire this year at the age of 83. 

I took his two of his American Politics classes. Neither one were required for a nursing degree but the basic American History class was filled up when I went to register and so somehow, I got in his class and I couldn't wait to take another. So I did. 

The first class I ever took from him, that man right up there stood in front of his class room, leaning over the podium in that exact posture (and '82 was one of the years I had him) and he began to lecture. He went right into it, never followed notes, just began to talk. And he'd barely begun when a timid knocking came from the door and he swiveled his eyes, then went and opened it. A worried-looking woman beckoned him out into the hallway and he shut the door and there was murmuring from outside it and then he strode back into the room, said, "Class dismissed. Goddamn fucking Datsun piece of shit." 

His 280-Z had caught fire in the parking lot. 

And that's the way he was. He cursed like a sailor. He called Richard Nixon "Trick", he made the presidents of old live and breathe. He didn't mince words when it came to subjects like slavery and politics, Civil Rights and Joe McCarthy. There was no text book. All of the exams (written in bluebooks) came directly from our notes on his lectures. He was amazing. 

I was in the process of getting a divorce when I was in his class and one day he came in and said to me, "You get divorced?" 

It had been in the legal ads of the paper. Do they still do that? Publish divorces? Anyway, they did then.

"Yes I did," I said. "How'd you know?"

"I've been divorced so many times I read that part of the paper everyday to see if I've gotten divorced again," he told me. 

I remember once when we had a paper due and I was overwhelmed with my nursing classes and my children and everything in my whole life, I went to him during office hours and asked if I could have an extension. 

"Sure," he said. "No problem."

And of course, the pressure being taken off of me, I got it in on time. And made an A on it. 

Here's another thing- I can almost bet you that if I ran into him today, he'd remember who I was. Of course, I sat on the front row and I paid attention but, still. He was (and I'm sure still is) a man who became deeply invested in his students. And not the sort of invested that my creepy-ass chemistry teacher was who closed and locked the door when his female students visited him during office hours and sat behind the desk and made subtle but not that subtle leering comments to us. Not Dr. Jones. He was straight-up and at the end of every semester, hosted a get-together at a local beer garden. 

He was awesome. And I'm sure he still is.

And I'm glad there was a lovely piece about him in the paper today and that he's still with us and sounds as vital and interested and interesting and invested as ever. I hope his retirement is a time of great and vast enjoyment for him. Maybe he'll write another book. Or four. Hell, maybe he'll even get married again. 

All right. Here's one more picture. And Mr. Moon took this one.

The grosbeaks have arrived. What a nice thing to happen on Easter or, in fact, any day. 

It's been such a good day.  And I'm still full from our lunch and rested from a nap. And restored. 

And according to those who blew bubbles today, Ninja Turtle bubbles are freaking amazing. So if you want some good bubbles, go to the Walgreens (which Hank calls the flea market of drug stores) and get you some. Because bubbles are magical and beautiful and wonderful and I can only imagine that if I was celebrating 4/20 that I'd be sitting in the back yard blowing some right now.

Love and kisses...Ms. Moon

Who Do You Have To Sleep With To Get A Chocolate Bunny Around Here?

I cursed myself with the statement about how chill I've been since returning from Mexico and some switch flipped last night. I went to bed pissed and I'm still pissed but I have at least recovered from my thought that I'm not even going to do the egg-dying thing tonight.
I guess we will.
Does anyone really WANT to?
I don't know. I have thirty eggs in a pot on the stove and that'll be thirty hard boiled eggs.



I hate Easter. Not because of the egg dying. I love the egg dying.

There's a blog I lurk at because the writer can't seem to make up her mind on whether she wants to talk about her vagina more or God and it's just insanely fascinating to me, and lately God has been winning and she put up a picture of a bloody Jesus hanging off the cross yesterday and maybe that's why I'm pissed off.
Bloody Jesus.

Have you ever been to a country where they hang up the corpses of animals to be sold as meat? I have. Flies are involved.

I just feel old.

Old as old bloody Jesus hanging off the cross.

Yesterday Owen told me to stay out of the bathroom because he was pooping. Because he is the boss of me, I did. I was approximately five feet away. I went in to check on him and he had gotten a lipstick and smeared it all over his face and hands and at first I thought the child was bleeding and my heart skipped several beats but I knew it wasn't blood because if it was, he'd have been screaming.

Oxyclean and hot water and laundry detergent will, in fact, remove lipstick from towels and rugs.

I didn't even really fuss at him. He also took some antlers of his grandfather's and poked holes in the screen with them. I thought he was smacking the screen with a strip of plastic he'd been holding seconds before and so didn't feel the need to go and look. I could hear him. He was fine. I've half-raised two brothers and entirely raised four children of my own and I should know better than to leave him alone, even if I can hear him, but it never occurred to me that he'd be poking holes in the screen with antlers.

I didn't really fuss about that either. Here's what I said, "Your Bop isn't going to like that."

Haha!

When Bop came home he didn't fuss at him much either. They pretended to fish off the side of the porch. They caught several sharks.

It's cold here this morning. Well, around fifty degrees or so, which is cold when it's been up in the high eighties already. We have the heat on in the baby chick room. Those baby chicks are growing so fast and one of the banty chicks is as big as Curly Sue, the "regular" chicken, and they flap around the box when you reach in to take them out so you can clean their cage and I think they could probably fly already. Also, some of them have such long necks that I am wondering if they aren't actually anhingas (aka Snake Bird) or at least somehow related to our chicken Ozzie who has the longest damn neck I've ever seen on a chicken. I can't see how this could be but there you go- long necked birds.
They're getting little tail feathers now.
They shake 'em.

If you're looking for a point here, you are going to be sorely disappointed.
(Point-disappoint? Mmmmm....)

So. Easter.
We have the baby chicks, we have the eggs. I saw a rabbit in the woods the other day. He did not have an Easter basket with him and he ran like hell when he saw me.

Here's a lily. Well, an amaryllis.

The funny thing about that amaryllis is that I brought it home from the woods. No, amaryllis don't grow in the woods normally. It was growing out of a pile of yard-trash that some asshole piece of shit person had dumped in the woods about eight months ago. I pulled it out of the mess it was in and brought it home and planted it in my flower bed and there it is.
I saved it! I saved its little amaryllis life!

I do not have any chocolate bunnies and I do not have a ham. Lily's making a ham tomorrow.

So we have Easter covered, as far as I can tell with the exception of the chocolate bunnies although I do not have any bloody Jesus hanging from a cross.
I will hang the clothes on the line.

That'll do.

I better go cut some collard greens. I better go hang those clothes. I better go attend to those eggs.

God, I feel old. I don't think that "Easter makes all things new!" thing is working for me.

Maybe it's working for you. I hope so.

Maybe I should talk about my vagina.

No way.

Yours sincerely...The Very Old Ms. Moon

Rant.

Well, I just answered everyone's comments on my last post and then Blogger lost them so screw that.
I'm freaking out because everyone is saying that they're being told they have to update their Blogger thing but I'm not getting that message.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
I don't know what anything means and most certainly I don't know what that dream I had about Keith Richards meant. I had to remind him that it was almost time for him to go onstage and he said, "Thanks!" He played but I left before the concert had barely begun. I think they were at the Opera House. Mick Jagger couldn't make it so a guy who used to be the vocalist for a band I used to go listen to stepped in for him and I guess I was disappointed. Or maybe I just didn't want to share the Wonder Which Is Keith with the masses.
Who knows?
Not me.

Yep. I'm in one of those moods. That frame of mind. I think the Easter season does this to me. I start feeling myself get all heated up when I see those crosses with the purple cloth draped over them. What? Y'all don't have those where you live? Maybe you do.

I have often said (and even here) that the only thing that comes between me and Jesus is the cross which I consider to be creepy and weird. As Tom Robbins pointed out in one of his books before he became a screwy-louie creepy old man, if Christ had died in modern times, people would be wearing little gold and silver electric chairs around their necks. Or something like that. Gas chambers. Lethal injection syringes.

I think Jesus was just all right and fine and dandy (although he probably fasted too much in the desert to have a real straight mind about him) but then they went and crucified him and he became a huge folk hero and everyone pinned their hopes for eternal life on him, somehow bringing it all together and making out that he was God's Only Son and as I have said before (yes, I repeat myself frequently) why WAS that, that God only had one son? Jesus, he was God. He could have had a billion or so.
Jim Bob Duggar has nineteen kids and he's nowhere close to being God. Of course, some of those are girls but we don't count as much. Ask the Pope. Ask Rick Santorum.

Well, I better stop this before I piss off everyone. I'm sorry if I don't believe in your god. Please don't feel as if I have singled Christianity out for criticism. I don't believe in Zeus either. I may believe in SOMETHING, but I do not know because my brain isn't big enough to know things like that but I do know that my brain is big enough to conceive of a universe that doesn't reward people for getting crucified by making them the son of god. I just HATE how every year we have to kill poor Jesus again and then let him rise from the tomb again and everyone's like, "Whoa! Who are you? Oh...are you JESUS?" And he's like, "If you believed in me, you'd KNOW I'm Jesus," and so forth.
And thus, the season of rebirth and as far as I'm concerned, the planet has that one covered all by itself, surrounded as I am by the new green on the trees and the flowers and these baby chickens and my new grandson and it does nothing for my soul to bring crucifixion into it. The universe has suffering galore, I don't need to celebrate it and I refuse to sanctify it.

Okay. Really. I'm done. There will probably be more later. I wish I could blame this crazy so-called writing today on drink or drugs but nothing more than caffeine was involved. Probably way too much of that, though.

Happy Friday, y'all.

Love...Ms. Moon

PS. YOU ARE NOT GOING TO FUCKING BELIEVE THIS! A JEHOVAH'S WITNESS JUST CAME TO MY DOOR TO GIVE ME THE GOOD NEWS!
Seriously. You can't make this shit up.
I said to her, "Lady, you just picked the wrong house."
"Are you an atheist?" she asked me.
"No," I said. "I just don't believe in fairy tales."
Then she called me honey. Boy. Was THAT a mistake. She wasn't even Southern. She was from somewhere UP NORTH! She was wearing creepy sunglasses and I couldn't see her eyes.

She could see mine, though and she left pretty darn quick. She'll be talking about the crazy woman who lives in that house for the rest of her life.

Hey! We Said Grace! (Don't Read This If The Word "Hoo-Hoo" Offends You.)

So we went to Lily and Jason and Owen's house this morning for a lovely Easter brunch and egg hunt and I have to say that it was practically perfect in every way. If May and Taylor and Kathleen and Vergil had made it, it would have been but May and Taylor had to work and Kathleen was indisposed and had Opera House duties to boot and Vergil's in Colorado. So...
But besides that, it was just lovely.
Lily made two gorgeous quiches, one spinach and feta and one with bacon and something else green. I forget. I couldn't get past the bacon. And she made ham! HAM I tell you! And there was fruit and a pineapple casserole. Yes! And a salad! And a carrot cake! And deviled eggs. Yummy, yummy deviled eggs. Oh, and smoked deer sausage! She did such a good job, that Lily. And she looked pretty too.

When we got there, Hank and Mark were already there with Granny. Mark always comes to our Easter gatherings and he calls me Mom. "Remember that year you talked Mom into making a ham?" he asked Hank. "That was awesome!"
Note:
How to charm me:
Call me "Mom" and recall specific things I have cooked for you. Works everydamn time.


Here's the group. Mark is taking the picture.

Cutest boy in the world with Monkey basket, hunting eggs.
Another:
He dug it. Every time he found another egg he'd say, "More!"

Eating the feast:

And to top it all off, on the way home we saw a rattlesnake!
In the road.
We turned around to check it out. Another car backed up and we met on either side of the poor thing which, it turns out, was dead. We all took pictures and remarked on it and briefly discussed rattlesnakes and then drove our separate ways.
Big doin's on Highway 158 on Easter.



And now....
Another CRAPTASTIC video from the very own personal camera of Ms. Moon! I swear, these things look great on the computer before I export and all that shit. I SWEAR!
But if you want to see what it sort-of looks like for eight adults to follow an almost-nineteen month old boy around as he hunts Easter Eggs for the first time, here you go. The dialogue is pretty simple. Mostly made up of "More!"



Since we got home we haven't done a damn thing but watch a movie with Ms. Mean Aunt Jessie Moon. Mr. Moon has some bad tooth pain and I gave him an old pain med left over from when Jessie got her knee surgery. He just sat back and watched the movie with a small smile on his face.
I don't why I'm so lazy. I didn't eat THAT much and I didn't even have a mimosa. I think it's because all my energy is leaking out my hoo-hoo.
Ha!
I had to put that in there for Ms. Radish King. Plus, if the damn hospital is going to block my site, then let's give them a reason! Besides for the use of the word "cocksucker."

Well, there you go. My true Easter post. Pictures of family and a discussion of what we ate and a small little video of a boy hunting Easter eggs. And a rattlesnake. And mention of my hoo-hoo.

And the word "cocksucker."

Yep. Sounds like Easter to me.

Hope yours was as good as ours.

Pass the salt and peel the eggs. Life is good.

P.S. Vergil- this is for you. We miss you and love you. Hope we see you soon!

Unintentional Still Life

A bit creepy, no?
But not nearly as creepy as the picture on the front of the paper this morning of a Good Friday reenactment of the crucifixion, all that long hair and blood and agony.

Why do we have to go through this over and over again? Why do we have to celebrate such horror? Why do we have to believe that one man could suffer for our sins? Why do we think that is the greatest pain anyone ever endured? Why do we think that Big God could have only one son? Why do we stand by such a gory story?

I think that Mel Gibson is no different than many humans, secretly thrilling at each cutting lash of the whip, each nail being driven through flesh and bone and nerve, ligament, tendon, the very impossible beauty of the human hand being rearranged with such disregard for the miracle of it.
The blood, oh the blood.

But it's okay! We redeem it all, that secret thrill of killing god in such a brutal, primitive way. We put Christ back into the womb-cave and then we allow him to be born again.

And if we believe in that we, too, can be born again and we too, can rise to heaven.

Oh whatever.

Perhaps the whole story has gotten twisted. Perhaps.

Perhaps because men know that they cannot create life in their own bodies they think that power is in taking life away. Perhaps the story is an allegory for the goddess's story. Men can take the life we create away in horrible, bloody ways but it is truly in the bloody wombcave that life can be formed, shaped, given.

And re-given again and again.

What do I know? Only what my heart tells me, what my eyes show me, what my mind allows me to believe or not believe.

Forgive them. They know not what they do.

Yes they did. They were killing a human. That's enough. Leave the godstuff out and it's just another state-sanctioned murder.

Here we are. Still celebrating this horror.

The madness of men. Let us make god in our image.

Mmmmpph.

Where are the fluffy lambs, this morning, Ms. Moon? Sacrificed to a bloody god.

Easter just makes me mad. Take a perfectly beautiful celebration of the natural order of the resurrection of life here on this planet as winter passes unto spring and turn it into a bloodbath. Follow up with a hazy rising-from-the-dead and pass around the chocolate bunnies.

Well. I'll probably lose a follower or two on this one. I always do when I talk about religion. Or the Christian religion. And yet, I get flyers in the mail from local churches telling me that if I come to their church on Easter I'll know what salvation is. And oh yes- don't forget the egg hunt! Bring the kiddies!
I open the paper and there's some poor boy, acting out Christ's agony, another in the costume of a Roman soldier.
People come to my house and knock on my door, telling me that theirs is the way, the truth, and the life.

I am just writing what I think here. I am just saying what I believe. No one is forced to believe it. I am not bringing it to your door or your mailbox.
I am just saying that I KNOW what the resurrection is. I see the lilies push through the soil every spring. I know what the life is. I see it all around me every day and I pay attention and I praise it. I am not telling you that if you don't believe as I do, you are facing an eternity of hellfire.

Poor Jesus. Eternally on that cross.

One more thing- who do you think suffered most? Christ on the cross or his mother watching his torture?

Why do we even have to ask these questions? Why aren't we rolling around in the fields and forests, celebrating the fertility of it all, crushing flowers beneath our backs, making perfume as we release their scent into the air around us, howling at the rising moon, it's belly as full as a woman's carrying life?

Yeah. I don't know either.

But don't go piercing any hands and feet for me. My sins are my own and I will or will not atone for them myself. And the mockingbird singing outside in the magnolia doesn't care one way or another and to me, that says it all.

Gifts. Chickens. Eggs. Easter

Roses that I have discovered in the yard which have never bloomed before, a white wisteria seed that Lis brought me, a tiny creamer bottle for fairy flowers and a book, both sent by Bethany.

All gifts.

And I planted the seeds for bottle gourds and heirloom cucumbers Bethany sent me as well as the zinnia and sunflower seeds. And I settled the wisteria seed into that pot and watered it well. I love gifts that say, "I know you. Here, grow this."
I love gifts that spring out of nowhere, red roses so deep in color that blood running from a vein couldn't touch it.

But my hens. Oh, they are not gifting me. Where are they laying their eggs? Darn those hens. Scared of snakes in the hen house and not one egg in the fern in the last two days. I don't have time to watch them all day long as they go from one part of the yard to another, doing whatever it is that hens do.
They are withholding their eggs from me and it's almost Easter.
It's not like they sit on those eggs and are protecting their soon-to-be-chicks.
No, they lay and then they leave.
Not one damn good mother in the bunch.

Perhaps they are just providing me with an Easter Egg hunt.
And perhaps Easter Egg hunts are nothing more than a very, very old dance between humans and chickens to find the eggs the chickens lay so profusely in woods and leaves and old sheds and ferns and wherever it is that chickens lay.

And what any of this has to do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ is beyond me.
Or chocolate for that matter.
Or some sort of pink protein served at Easter dinner (ham, salmon, rare lamb) or...Peeps!
Or bunny rabbits! What do bunny rabbits have to do with the resurrection of our Lord and Savior?

Mmmm.
Probably no more than trees have to do with the birth of Baby Jesus.
Or Lay-Away at Walmart.

Sometimes I feel so sorry for Jesus that it makes me want to steal him out of the manger

and send him to public school and tuck him into bed every night and tell him that it's not his job to save the world.
Just be a boy, I'd tell him.
Just be a sweet man, I'd say.
Just be a really, really smart man and know how much your mama loves you.

And maybe he'd look at me with eyes like, really? and I'd look back at him with eyes like REALLY and he'd stick his thumb in his mouth and turn over and I'd reach under his shirt and lightly scratch his back and hum a little song to him and I wouldn't leave his bedside until he fell asleep and then I'd kiss his little Jesus curls and on Easter, I'd fix him up a basket with jelly beans and chocolate bunnies and chickens that you could wind up and set down and watch hop, hop, hop across the floor and leave it by his bed so that he'd wake up in the morning and find it and he wouldn't have any fear of being crucified at all.
And then we'd go hunt eggs that our hens had left us. Somewhere. It might take all day, but we'd find them.

Oh. And no one would have to wear a crucifix around their neck and churches wouldn't have to have that horrible statue of Jesus with his bleeding hands and feet, his ribs all poking out, his head tilted to the side, his eternity-seeing eyes staring off into space and little children wouldn't have to see that, none of them.
Especially not Jesus himself.

And maybe on Easter Morning there would be a new litter of baby rabbits to cuddle and stroke, maybe there would be a nest full of just-hatched peeps to wonder at.
I know boys.
And if there was a Jesus he was a boy once. And I think he would have liked that.

Well. I've just picked basil and my hands smell of it, stink of it, and I'm going to go peel and mush garlic and they'll stink even more.

I have a good imagination, I'm a good cook, and I've had a weekend full of gifts.

Ain't nothing wrong with that.

Not one damn thing.

Easter

I came home from Kathleen's last night and wrote and wrote and wrote. It was all scattered and one of those writing-times where you have all these bits and pieces you are trying to weave together into something coherent, something lovely.
It got late.
I went to bed.
What I was saying (I think) was that here we are, on this tiny mote of planet in this tiny solar system in this tiny galaxy in this huge universe where the things we can see or understand are so small as to be unimaginable and somehow instead of making me feel useless or unimportant or as if I need to have a credo or a religion or a savior or a belief in an after-life, it makes me feel as if my life is truly my own and if, when I die, none of it matters, well then- so be it!
I can't save the world and I doubt I can fuck it up, either.

And that while I am here, I can do what I want. It is my life. It is not my tribe's life, nor my savior's life. It is not your life or even my children's life. It is my own.

And that on Easter, which is a made-up holiday (as they all are except for the ones which represent the actual turning of seasons) I can celebrate as I want. I celebrate the beginnings of new life springing from older life, not the weird resurrection of a crucified life. Poor Jesus, nailed to that cross and asked to suffer again year after year, then forced to come back again and again to roll away the stone, to unwind that shroud. I sort of want to say, "Hey, let the man rest in peace."

Ah no. Give me birds and give me babies.



Give me love and give me flowers. Give me this planet right now with its gravity and grace. Give me this life I have. I need no other not today or tomorrow and especially not after I die. Give me the ability to love this life, to love the people my heart has found to love. Give me the heart to notice the glory in the here and now and the humbleness to accept it as it is given. Give me the ability to give it back.

Love and light, we tumble through the darkness of space, given our own lamp of sun, our own spirits of struggle and strife and acceptance. Our own faces, hands, smiles, work, pleasure, dreams, rest, and getting-up-again. It is all nothing, it is all everything.

I know so little, I have been given so much.

Happy Easter.


It is yours to do with as you will, just as it is mine.