Past Blogs

The curtain came down today at 4:19PM CDT. Summer has bowed out; Autumn begins its reign.

My husband and I agree on almost everything from politics to the horrors of oatmeal. One glaring exception is goldenrod. He hates it; I love it.

“It’s coarse and ugly,” he says.

I suspect another dimension to his distaste of this plant. My husband’s favorite season is summer. Yellowing goldenrod is a harbinger of fall. He wants to shoot the messenger.

Every spring I must wage a campaign to save the sprouting goldenrod. I’ll capitulate and let him tear up a few stalks that are trespassing in the daylilies or pampas grass. He will be kind and leave large, sprouting swathes untouched.

As I look out onto our yard now, the goldenrod is waving like amber surf. And everywhere I drive, the roadsides are shimmering. Alongside the roads, the goldenrod teams up with huge stands of lavender-topped Joe Pye Weed and royal purple asters. Soon the sumac will turn brilliant crimson and join the party.

Summer may be dying, but its last act is sheer brilliance.

Shakespeare is almost always right on the mark, but he missed the target when it comes to lawyers. They should not all be killed.

My lawyer is wonderful, and I would have had a hard time coping the last 23 years without him. Anyone who could guide us through five estates and one attack by a hugely talented scam artist who preyed on one of my relatives is a treasured person.

I did not choose this lawyer, my Aunt Vi found him. Her original lawyer had died, she needed a new will and she could not drive. Being staunchly independent, Aunt Vi hatched a great scheme for finding a new attorney. She decided to ride the Lincoln Avenue bus that ran in front of her apartment to the end of the line. She knew there were many office complexes where the bus route ended. Then she would start walking (my Aunt Vi was a great walker), pick an attractive office complex and check the lobby index for lawyers.

Her plan worked like a charm. Her choice has been our family lawyer through thick and thin.

My beloved Aunt Vi was the first of our elders to die. She was 89 and died of a massive heart attack that hit her at the end of a 6 mile walk on a frigid January day.  My first job as an executor started, and three more have followed. My husband had one estate to execute as well.

I believe an alarming “do-it-yourself” trend has invaded America. Lawyers are replaced by a “Write Your Own Will In 30 Minutes” book, teachers by home schooling, doctors by a crop of Echinacea or St. John’s Wort in the front yard and police by the fully loaded home gun cabinet.

Do we live in a nation of multi-tasking geniuses? I prefer to rely on the professionals… I need all the help I can get.

It was the ultimate irony. My husband and I just spent a night sleeping across the street from an oatmeal factory. Our aversion to steamy bowls of oatmeal is no secret.

Returning from a wedding, we had booked a nice high rise hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The computer booking site did not mention that the rooms of the hotel had panoramic views of the towering grain elevators and red neon sign atop the Quaker Oats factory across the street. Nor was there any mention of the long trains hauling oats.

Our mutual oatmeal dislike started early in life. I still have a vivid memory of the day my grandmother said to a bunch of us grandchildren, “I have a special treat for you.” Big bowls of oatmeal were set in front of each of us. I eagerly ate the melting pat of butter and brown sugar off the top. Then, I stared forlornly at the gray, lumpy, soggy, gooey stuff that remained in my bowl. Miles away in northern Wisconsin, my future husband’s mother was pulling a similar oatmeal scam on him.

Our room in Cedar Rapids included breakfast. “I bet they pipe the oatmeal directly into this hotel in big tubes,” I predicted.

Before all of the oatmeal lovers out there accuse me of hurting oatmeal’s feelings, let me state that a large box of Quaker Oatmeal is in my kitchen cupboard. That oatmeal guy knows how to make great cookies, cakes and muffins. We just don’t let him go near any of our cereal bowls.

A serious note: We were happy to bring our travel dollars to Cedar Rapids. The town is still struggling to recover from the devastating flood of 2008. Happily, the Cedar Rapids Art Museum (which houses the world’s largest collection of Grant Wood’s art) and The Grant Wood Studio on 5 Turner Alley have both reopened.

Serendipity is wonderful stuff. When serendipity strikes twice in a row, it’s a double delight.

Our first quirk of chance happened in February at the gigantic Gem and Mineral Show in Tucson. We stumbled onto a booth of Petoskey stones only to learn that these fascinating rocks are found in our own Lake Michigan (albeit on the other side). A trip to the far shore to search for these amazing stones – actually 360 million year old fossilized coral – was in order.

Last week we visited the eastern shore. We saw towering sand dunes and rock-strewn beaches. We did not find a Petoskey stone.

However, another rock surprise awaited us. I must note that my husband and I are aficionados of architecture, having traveled across America visiting sites by Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, Greene and Greene and other luminaries. But neither one of us had ever heard of Earl Young and his amazing “mushroom” houses in Charlevoix, Michigan. The town is peppered with his homes, built between the late 1920’s to 1964. Constructed with small to massive boulders from the Lake Michigan shoreline and other native rocks, these homes are utterly unique. He drew no formal plans or blueprints, but relied “on sketches jammed into his pocket and ideas in his head.” We would happily move into any one.

Following is a tour of an Earl Young neighborhood.

My husband calls little dogs “dog seeds.”

“Plant them,” he says, “and they might grow into real dogs, such as German Shepherds, Labradors or St. Bernards.” After laughing, I must admit that finding the wolf in a Chihuahua or teacup poodle is a stretch.

We’re a feline family, and our domestic cats display almost identical behaviors to their big, wild cousins. They stalk, pounce, groom, mark and cover their food just like miniature tigers.

Cats have been domesticated a mere 5,000 years. The Egyptians lured small, wild desert cats into their homes, most likely to keep rodents out of the grain piles. (Beer and bread were staples in Egypt.) Everyone who lives with cats knows they are still undecided about buying into the ongoing domestication experiment.

Dogs, on the other hand, have been at our sides around 14,000 years. The price these loving companions have paid for domestication is steep. Their brains are about 20% smaller than their wolf brothers. That’s the consequence of having a brimming bowl of dog kibble presented on a regular schedule.

The origin of the domestic dog was believed to be East Asia. However, this theory is “left in disarray” by a new gene study of dogs presented this month. A genome-scanning chip has been developed for dogs. Village dogs throughout the world are being pounced on by eager geneticists who are taking blood samples. There’s a high probability that the puzzle of where dogs first originated will be solved sometime soon.

In the meantime, we can all throw our favorite pup a bone and laze around enjoying these last, precious dog days of summer. The cats are already all asleep.