There's No Place Like Home

Previously published in Coastal Illustrated Feb. 22, 2012

               Something is in the air. 

               And given the thick build up of frost on my windshield the other morning, it sure isn't spring.

               It all started a few weeks ago when our marsh cat, Otis a.k.a "Fatticus Rex" or simply, "Fatty," as we call him, finally achieved what he has been trying to do since we adopted him: escape.

               Now, I'm not sure if it's the dog who drags him around by his ear, sharing a litter box with Mirage, a.k.a “Scabby,” or the call of the wild, but as soon as the front door opens, he's out like a shot- or more like a furry, fuzzy, 90 lb ball of pent up frustration.

               Usually, we chase him.  This is probably poor parenting, because he really kind of gets a kick out of the five of us, including the dog, making weird sounds and throwing treats at him while crawling around on all fours next to the air conditioning unit.

               This last time, though, out of desperation, oh and a 7 p.m. dinner reservation, we let him fend for himself.

               As if I wasn't feeling bad enough about leaving the "little" guy out in the cold, I get a text on the way to the restaurant from one of my daughters at home with our sitter, Ali.

               "Mommy where is Otis??"

               Two seconds later.

               "Mommy where is OTIS!!!!!!!"

               And then to drive her point home, she followed up with 10 emoticons in varying states of distress.

               Here's what I texted back: "He ran outside. Bring food to porch, shake bag, and pour into bowl.  He will come."

               Sure enough, all it took was for her to open the door.  To say Fatty knows where his Fancy Feast is buttered is an understatement. 

               So, to my surprise, not two days had gone by and a similar situation unfolded right by the very same front door.  Only this time, it involved one of our two-legged creatures who, up until now, I couldn't pry off my legs, back, arms and feet.

               "So where are you going to go? You don't even have a pair of shoes on let alone enough money to get something to eat," I say to one of my daughters as she grabs for the door handle.

               Now, I am not sure what got her in such a state to run away with only a grocery bag filled with glow sticks and a pocket-sized flashlight to guide her.  Was it the dog she was supposed to help wash, Fatty and Scabby's litter box that was to be cleaned, or was it a call from her sister from the other room saying only babies watch Scooby Do? 

              

               I couldn't be sure because she blew past me, a whirling 90 lb dervish of clear lip gloss, green apple scented shampoo, and truck load of Claire accessories. I didn't go after her.  She’ll come back.

               I guess I just assumed she just wanted to get out of the house for awhile.

               Don't we all?  I took one look at my laundry pile and dirty dishes stacked in and around the sink and silently prayed for a divine intervention, or a spa trip...... whichever came first?  Beggars can't be chooser, you know.

               What is it about this time of year when we'd rather be any place but where we

are?

               Is it cabin fever, a lack of proper sunlight, or a meaningful holiday?  How come it seems we have reached a breaking point where we are all getting on each other's ever last nerve?

               Why do we want to run away and come back when everything is warm, and flowery, and candy-colored pink?

               My daughter didn't stay out in the cul-de-sac long.  I don't know if it was because she was cold or because I opened the door and silently held out a Little Debbie Zebra Cake and a DVD of Miss Congeniality 2.  But in she came.

               We popped in our movie, had a snack, and folded laundry.  

               And we thought of spring and all its possibilities.....cart wheeling through sprinklers in our bathing suits, skipping barefoot in thick, green grass singing to butterflies, sitting cross-legged in the warm sand building a castle fit-sort of- for royalty, planting bulbs in rich, dark dirt and watching them bloom, rocking on the porch with a good book and a cold drink, glancing up every once and awhile and saying a silent prayer because we are here and alive and beautiful, in our own right, every single one of us.......and all of a sudden we felt a bit calmer.

               Spring will come. It always does.

              Like the pull of the heart to the place where it's anchored, it won't take long to show back up, knocking on our front porch, asking to come in. And as we always do, we will open our door and, thankfully, let it all in.

Rough Waters

Previously published in Coastal Illustrated March 7, 2012

               When it rains, it pours. 

               This expression has turned out to be an almost weekly, if not daily, forecast for my life since last November.  I keep sitting around waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop, and not just drop by the way, but land on my head, knocking me out for the count.

               Recent events have not boded well for my psyche.  See, I am a worrier of Olympic proportions, a gold medalist, if you will; a champion like no other. If worrying was a contact sport like football, I’d be wearing the Super Bowl ring.

               I know it's not good for me, but I can't help it.  I worry if the oven is on and coffee pot is off.  I worry that a suspension cord will snap off the bridge as I drive across it, sending me into the water without ever ordering that window smasher thingamajig I saw on late night TV.

               I worry that reincarnation does exist, and it's John Candy, not my dog that is staring at me with a sheepish grin because I am standing there dripping wet without a towel.

               I worry about wearing leather, weather, traffic, micro-waving plastic, being too sarcastic and artificial sweeteners.

               So, yes.  I will go ahead and admit it.  I am a card carrying, certified sweater of life’s smaller stuff.

               But ever since November, I'd take the small stuff over the big any day.  I'd like to sit down and tell you everything, I would, but I don't have enough room, or time, or emotional fortitude.  I can share one story with you because it is one that had a happy ending.  What happened in the beginning and the middle though, made me miss the small stuff; kind of like how a little kid at camp on the first night misses his mom during a thunderstorm followed by hail.

               It all started two Fridays ago.  My cell phone started to ring that evening and since my "only call here with good news, please" voice mail message seems to be ignored as of late, I asked my husband to answer it.  It was my dad.

               As he told me the bad news, I didn't have time to retreat into a younger, innocent, naive version of me, curled in a ball, wanting her mommy, waiting out a storm.  This time it was my mom who needed me.  Her doctor had recommended a biopsy after her last mammogram.  The labs had come back a few minutes before the call.  It was cancer. And, yes, of course....I'd come home.

               It's funny how, even though you have an idea of where your life is supposed to go and you've clung on to all the wagers you made along the way to get there, there remains this feeling that, sure enough, a road block is coming up around the bend that will derail you from your well thought out, but precarious plan.  How can you forge ahead when there seems to be no way around?

               “I want to see my granddaughters get married.”

               “I know Mom, I want that, too.”

               Now, normally if I am leaving town, as a warrior worrier, I'd have dotted every

“i” and crossed every “t”, but I didn't have time to even worry about how the girls, and my hubby, and the dog and the three cats would get thought the week without me.  Honestly, I didn't have time to run to the store, wash their uniforms for school that week, let alone write their schedules down in a newsy style word document, then paste it on the fridge, my husband’s dash board, and over the bathroom sink.  I had to let it all go.  Like life...real life....We were all going to have to just wing it.

               That week in Augusta, with my mom and brother and Aunt Shirley is still kind of a blur of tests, MRI's, chest x-rays and consultations.  Though now, we know where every bathroom is located in University Hospital.

               "Where are we again?" I'd ask.

               "Out Patient," Aunt Shirley would say.

               “So I take a left next to the nurses’ station, a right at the waiting room, and go straight towards the soda machines, then a u-turn by the big clock and I’ll find the bathroom?"

               "No, that's Inpatient. Take three rights, jog down the hall, and look behind the elevator," she says. “I think you might get there in time if you leave now. Good luck and Godspeed. You’ll know where to find us when you're done."

               We did have one day off from the hospital, which was Wednesday.  We had lunch and did some shopping...anything to keep Mom’s mind off her upcoming surgery on Friday.  Mom had fun picking out a few outfits for my oldest to take with her to Camp Ebenezer, her first overnight school trip.  Aunt Shirley even found a new bathing suit, the first she ever bought that she "could fit a leg in and not displace the pool water" with.  She also bought Mom an inspirational book of short stories.

               In the intro, the author recommended the reader should lighten his or her load on their respective ship of life.  It would make for smoother sailing.  We all smiled at the advice, but I couldn't help be a doubter, maybe that’s the worrier in me.   That's all well and good, but if we’re talking in clichés, we might as well run with it.  The truth is it doesn’t matter how light you pack your ship, because you’ll never be able to predict bad weather.

               Mom was so incredibly lucky.  Sure, the week was hell, but she just put one foot in front of the other, and with humor and grace, made it through her surgery.  She had a lumpectomy and they took out the sentinel node for testing.  It, THANKFULLY, came back negative so her tumor never spread.  Six weeks of radiation and this will be behind her, but the tumor made a permanent mark.  It proved we don’t know how to give up, no matter what gets thrown at us.

               My husband, by the way, did a pretty good job sweating all the small stuff back here while I was gone.  He went shoe shopping and bought the wrong girl a new pair of shoes, the one who already owns five.  But he did find the missing tennis shoes of the girl who desperately needed them.  Who would have thought they would be, not under, but in the bed?  He also put them in the only clean school uniforms they had to play golf on Sunday, so he stayed up late doing laundry and forgot to pack their lunch that first day.  But they made it out ago and had a lot of laughs in the process.

               Me, I missed it, the normalcy of the everyday chaos.  I think that’s part of what life is all about.  I don’t think it’s wrong to sweat the small stuff because in the end, I am just happy to be here to sweat it out all the same.

               We might not know how to predict the weather, but we sure as heck know how to open up an umbrella and bail the water out of a sinking ship.

               We are stronger than we think even in the roughest of storms. 

              

               We are, quite simply, survivors.  

The Writing On The Stall

 Previously published in the Coastal Illustrated October 5, 2011

             I love a good book.

As one of my all-time favorite writers, Mark Twain, told a young audience in 1882, “There are many sorts of books.  But the good ones are the sort for the young to read.  Remember that. They are a great, an inestimable, an unspeakable means for improvement.  Therefore be careful in your selection, my young friends.  Be very careful.”

This could be why one of my favorite activities, besides reading, is helping the Frederica Academy first grade teachers with literature every Friday morning.  You may be asking right about now why would any sane person surround themselves by a group of sneezing, coughing, fidgety six year olds on a Friday without getting paid or at the very least, offered a medical and dental plan.  You might even ask why in the world would you teach these little ones literature in the first place since they are, after all, only six…. and well… fidgety and sneezy.  But see, there isn’t anywhere else I’d rather be.

Not only are the best books (think Tom Sawyer, Little Women, Treasure Island) perfect “for the young to read” when they’re the most receptive, but they’re also instrumental in teaching them the writing skills used to create these very masterpieces.  A child is never too young to be exposed to the beauty of a simile, the rhythmic sound of alliteration, or the punch of a “red hot” verb, as Mrs. Floyd calls them.  These children are taught not just to read, but to think like little writers.

How great is that?

So that is where I found myself last Friday, in Mrs. McCollum’s first grade class, teaching nine first grade boys the importance of using descriptive “red hot” verbs.

“Can anyone remember a great action word from the sea turtle story Mrs. Floyd just read to us,” I asked a small group of three boys at the back table, my dry eraser pen in one hand and a small white board in the other.  “The more descriptive the verb, the better.”

One of them thrusts his left arm up while supporting it with his right hand as if it weighed as much as a two ton truck loaded down with three hundred gallons of gasoline.

“Puke,” he hollered, still waving and holding up his arm.  “My baby brother puked all over the kitchen table last night.”

“That is a great action word, you’re right,” I told him as I inched back in my seat.  I had already bathed myself with a bottle of hand sanitizer and swallowed eight vitamin C tablets before sitting down, but still, one can never be too careful.  “But can we think of one from the story….like the sea turtle “scooped” the sand with his fin.”

“Oh I know, I know, I know,” another boy screamed, jumping up and down in his seat.  “Flush!  Yeah, like I just flushed my pee down the urinal.”

“That’s a good one too,” I responded.  “But how about let’s pick one from the story….like the shark “cruised” through the water.”

“What’s a urinal,” the third one asked.

“It’s that white thing you pee into in the boys’ bathroom that swishes and squirts when you flush it,” he proudly told the group before turning to me, a bright smile slowly spreads across his cute, freckled face.  “How about those red hot verbs, Ms. Laura?”

“Can I go to the bathroom,” the second one begged, his leg suddenly spasms underneath the table, knocking off a few pencils, the dry erase board, and a jar of hamster food.  “All this talk about verbs is making me have to go tinkle.”

“Me, too!” said the third.

“Can I go to the nurse,” whispered the first, looking a little green all of a sudden.  “I don’t feel so good.”

Now, you will have to agree with me that potty obsession aside, these boys really know their verbs.  That being said, we can’t really blame them for this universal fixation on all things bathroom related.  It appears we have not heeded Mr. Twain’s advice and made them that way.

Since our children could walk and somewhat talk, we have read them books titled My Potty and I, Where’s the Poop?, and The Magic Bowl over and over again, even hosting Q and A sessions at the end with a cupcake party option for “just sitting on the thing for goodness sakes.”  We have invested in fancy, designer “big girl or boy” underwear if they’ll trade up from their Elmo trainers and swim pants.  We have bought enough stickers to decorate the Sydney Lanier bridge let alone their potty “throne” that plays CCR’s “Have You Ever Heard the Rain” when they go.  

            Remember the cheers, the high fives, the dollar bills, the promised trips to Disney when they finally made it to the bathroom in time.  Is it their fault they can’t seem to think of anything else?

Sadly, as adults, it seems some of us still dwell close to the border of the bathroom obsessed as well.  This is evident in more than a few public restrooms off I-95.

“Mommy, who is Sandy,” my daughter asks me from the next stall.

“How should I know,” I answer.  I was a little distracted trying to not touch anything and juggle my sunglasses, keys, and phone all under one arm.  “Why?”

“It says to call her for a good time.”

And these little ditties aren’t just relegated to roadside truck stops.

 My 34 year old best friend has not one, but two, fart apps on her iPhone and, just last year, a friend gave me a book titled What’s Your Poo Telling You? for my 39^th birthday along with a bottle of Poo-Pourri Royal Flush toilet spray. 

All kidding aside, I guess I’ll go ahead and admit I’m not so above it all either.  Just the other night, my girls and I slipped a whoopee cushion under their father’s chair.  I don’t think I’ve laugh so hard in awhile.  In fact, as the saying goes, I laughed so hard tears almost came down my legs. 

So my apologies Mr. Clemens, I guess I should be more careful in the future about what I read…oh, and write.     But wasn’t it you who said “I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who as no redeeming petty vices whatever.” Vices, it seems, I may have in spades.  My salvation, however, is at least I resisted writing any of this on the side of a bathroom wall……

Because………………..

Happy Reading!!!!