Past Blogs

I once had lunch with a python.

We were in a ramada at the edge of a rain forest preserve, and our knowledgeable guide said,”We’re in luck, do you see that giant python in the rafters? He’s been digesting his dinner up there for a week.”

Everyone in our group was calm, knowing that pythons are nonvenomous and that we were lucky to see such a fine fellow.

We did not take a walk with the rattlesnake, however. After driving to the trail head in the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, I happened to glance out the car window before opening the door. A long rattlesnake was cruising across the blacktop a few feet from the car door. We waited to exit until he (or she) slithered north into the desert. Then we took the south trail head.

Our friend, Peg, has the best snake story. I first must note that she has an incredibly observant eye for nature, always spotting things the rest of us would miss.

Peg was on a guided birding hike with a group in Trinidad. She astutely observed  a snake near the path and pointed it out to the guide. He blanched. The snake was a Fer De Lance, an extremely venomous and aggressive reptile. The guide rapidly moved the group to safety.

The moral of these stories is obvious: Life is good if you keep your eyes open and your brain engaged.

Pie attracts tourists like flies. Throw in an obscure location and a high elevation, and it is even a more powerful magnet. I am definitely not immune.

Last week included a pie pilgrimage to Julian, California, elevation 4,235 feet. Julian is two blocks long, looks like a set for a western movie and is crawling with tourists. Every second establishment is selling pies, either whole or by the slice.

Julian doesn’t give tourists a choice of fillings. All the pies are apple. Pastry upper crust or crumb topping are the only variations.

We bought an entire pie to share with our extended family of eight. Smelling a Julian pie in the back seat for 63 miles and not sticking a thumb in it requires serious self control.

Undoubtedly, the mecca of high altitude pie consumption in the U.S.A. is Pie Town, New Mexico, which sits on the Continental Divide at about 8,000 feet. This teeny town is remote: it is three hours from Albuquerque in Catron County (7,000 square miles, 3,543 people). Call ahead to be sure the Pie Cafe will be open or come to the Pie Festival on the second Saturday in September.

Pie tourism also occurs at sea level, most notably in Key West, Florida, the southernmost city in America. I’m sure it is not a coincidence that “Key Lime” rhymes with “sublime”.

My own state of Wisconsin gets a slice of the pie vacation trade as well. The small, rural town of Osseo draws pie lovers from all over the Midwest. Head to the Norske Nook and you will get  plenty of choices…over 30 luscious pies are on the menu.

Perhaps I should retire and become a pie tourism travel guide. I could call my new business “Pie and a Suitcase”. Kindly let me know if you have a favorite pie destination.

America is a weird country. We got a call from our vet clinic the other night at dinnertime. They were calling to inquire how our big ginger cats, Gato and Neko, were feeling after their yearly shots.

At the time of the call, both cats were tangled up beneath our feet under the kitchen table hoping for some fallout from our dinner. We assured our clinic that all was well (except that we would have to be careful not to trip over our panhandlers).

My husband and I have cared for seven of our family elders. Not one of their numerous physicians- and some were excellent- ever bothered to call and follow up after serious procedures. In fact, no doctor even bothered to show up and provide comfort when these people were dying. Hospice workers, underpaid but remarkable nursing home aides and we cared for the dying.

In contrast, a vet came to our home in our cat Blaise’s last hour and stayed to comfort us. Is it time, perhaps, to question a system where animals get more compassionate care than people?

A remedy is at hand. I made a checklist the other day. I have a heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, skin and various bones, actually fewer bones than in a cat’s body. Other mammals have all these parts as well. I am at risk for a carload of diseases; heart, cancer, arthritis, respiratory, etc. Ditto for our pet mammals. Obviously, I should have a vet as a doctor.

Tongue in cheek, I discussed this possibility with one of our wonderful vets. She proceeded to tell us how hard she has to fight for quality, personal care for her own aging father. By using her medical skills, she was able to question the doctors med choices for her dad and get him on better medications.

Why aren’t the libertarians crusading for our right to choose a vet? I guess they are just too busy taking health care of any kind away from all of us.

Orioles will always be magical to me. When I was a child, orioles lived in our neighbor, Mrs. Kurtz’s, wondrous yard.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of standing in our alley holding the rusty wires of the fence that marked off Mrs. Kurtz’s large rectangular garden plot. I would stare at the beautiful world this elderly Czech-American widow created and be enchanted. To me, the Garden of Eden couldn’t have been more mesmerizing .

I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood  of  small  houses with an alley running down the middle of the block. Many neighbors tended gardens and flowers, but none could compare to the oasis that was one house over from mine.

Mrs. Kurtz’s house was completely unassuming; two story, frame and gray as all the paint had weathered off. The yard was the consuming joy and treasure of this woman’s life. She worked in it all day during gardening season, and the earth responded to her love tenfold.

I am sure it was the vibrant colors of her flowers that first attracted me, but the garden design was compelling as well. A grass path wound like a river through the rectangular garden plot. I imagined myself walking through that profusion of flowers. But in the 1950’s children did not rule the world, and I knew full well what the word “trespass” meant.

Pear and other fruit trees filled the yard not occupied by the garden. And only Mrs. Kurtz had orioles. Every year they would return and build a spectacular hanging nest in one of her pear trees. I anthropomorphized all animals and was certain the orioles knew that she loved them.

Yesterday, I bought an amazingly expensive bag of oranges and the largest jar of grape jelly on my grocery store shelf. I will never be a gardener like my beloved childhood neighbor, but I’m going to do my best to keep the orioles that are fluttering outside my window.

If I start to tell a joke, stop me. It is genetically impossible for me to deliver a punch line.

I know I’m not a humorless person. My husband and I frequently fill the house with laughter. We are, in fact, a perfect match when it comes to our taste in humor. We both love Garrison Keillor and his weekly Prairie Home Companion monologue. And neither of us can hit the off button on the radio fast enough when Garrison does his annual joke show. How many “Unitarians changing a light bulb” jokes can a person stand?

I got to thinking recently about what makes us laugh, and suddenly I was laughing out loud. My husband asked what was so hilarious. Since I was making the bed at the time, he knew that wasn’t the source of my mirth.

“Remember,” I managed to sputter out, “when we got the sleeper couch stuck upside down in the stairwell?”  Then, both of us were laughing.

The sleeper bed had lived a full life and was headed for the trash pickup. We debated which door to carry it out. Down the stairs to the basement and out to the driveway was our agreed upon exit route. We made it out of the bedroom, around a corner and almost down to the bottom of the stairs when the couch got wedged between the ceiling and the side walls. We did not panic, even though, as everyone knows, sofa beds weigh a zillion pounds. We both still had faith that with a little maneuvering it would be freed and out on the driveway a mere 12 feet away.

Ten minutes and 10,000 spent calories later, we concluded that we had indeed managed  to wedge the couch permanently in the stairwell. I was holding the back end up trying to mitigate wall damage. The wallboard at my husband’s end was already destroyed. We started to laugh. We had unwittingly put ourselves in an “I Love Lucy” skit. If the cats had been filming us, we could have gone viral on YouTube.

Simultaneously, we arrived at the only solution.

“Get the saw,” I said. A full hour of sawing ensued, and the couch was removed in pieces, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “sectional couch”.

I hate to admit it, but I do know what makes us laugh…it’s us. I’ll save the story of how my husband accidentally blew up the bathtub for another day.