Past Blogs

Opossum

I am starting an opossum fan club. I’m hoping all of you will join.

There will be no dues, meetings or cute T-Shirts. The membership requirement is quite simple: always speak kindly (and knowledgeably) about opossums.

Possums need all the love they can get. I include information on these shy creatures in many of my natural science programs for children. Kids are always coming up to me after the programs to tell me about possums who wandered into their garage or under their porch. How the kids’ big macho dads handled the situations is invariably stomach-turning.

As one of the proprietors of the Tooley Cafe, I’ve lived side by side with opossums everyday for years. They are one of my favorite animals to watch, although observation has to be at night as these critters are nocturnal. Their faces always remind me of little Draculas. Their “hairlines” are pointed exactly like his. If caught in a light, their eyes shine red, another Halloweenish feature.

To help you market love for opossums, I will arm you with these splendid, scientific facts:

  • Opossums are America’s only marsupials. (No need to go to Australia to see a genuine pocket mammal, there may be one in your backyard.)

  • Possums have handy prehensile tails which they use as a fifth hand for support and holding things. They do not sleep hanging from trees.

  • Opossums are highly adaptable and will eat almost anything, even rattlesnakes.

  • Mom has as many as 18 or more navy bean size babies. They immediately climb into her pouch, but only an average of 9 will survive.

  • After about 2½ months, the babies are weaned and ride around on mom’s back.

  • The adult opossum weighs 2,000 times its birth weight.

  • Possums put on a threat display when cornered. They pull back their lips showing their 50 pointy teeth and hiss. Leave it alone, and the frightened opossum will be happy to exit.

  • Playing dead is an involuntary coma-like state brought on by fear.

  • The tips of the opossum’s furless tail and ears often get frostbite during winter, turn black and fall off.

I hope by now you’re ready to be opossum fan club members. And I won’t even ask you to knit tail warmers and earmuffs!

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Names

My name is Mary because my mother was not a risk-taker. If her wishes had come true, I would have attended an Ivy League school and joined the ranks of the elite. Mom knew that the young ladies who grace the halls of the Seven Sisters are not named Sunrise or Moonbeam.

Doing programs for almost 20,000 children a year keeps me abreast of the trends in names. I confidently can state that the two largest sources of current, non-traditional names are western geography books and nature preserves. I have taught scores of Cheyennes, Codys and Dakotas. More recently, I’ve met Montana, Wyoming and Phoenix. Can Sioux and Billings be far behind? Some classroom roll calls resemble departure gate announcements at a western airport.

The nature names can be explained by this experience. I walked into a classroom a while back, and the teacher told me she had her own park. Tree, Forest and Branch were all students in her class. And just last week I met two lovely little girls, Clearwater and Rainbow.

Of course, I’m jealous. I would just love to be Sky, Sonora or Sedona. The only family member of mine who exercised creativity when naming children was my paternal grandmother. She named her sons after British kings and her daughters after flowers. I missed being Peony by a generation.

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Elsewhere

Maybe it’s because we are a frontier people, or maybe it’s our flagrant love affair with cars. At any rate, it seems that a great number of Americans want to be anywhere they are not.

I first discovered this strange phenomenon many years ago via motel room art.

Walking into a New England motel room, I was greeted with pictures of lacy New Orleans scenes. Similarly, southern motel room walls were adorned with desert sunset art. California inns sported pictures of Paris. It’s a delightful relief to find a room where the art on the walls actually matches the scenery outside the door.

The other night I ran into another hilarious variant of this mindset. My husband wanted to stop off at a Sheboygan nursery to pick up some day lilies. I had never been to this nursery before and was speechless when we pulled into the parking lot. I was staring at a life-size saguaro cactus.

Since real saguaros only grow in the Sonoran desert, this Sheboygan saguaro needs some explanation. It was a topiary saguaro. An unlucky evergreen had been wired, clipped, bent and tortured into a replica of the world’s largest cactus. Wouldn’t a topiary bratwurst be more appropriate for Sheboygan? Click here to see this botanical wonder!

Of course, the ultimate “I’m here but I want to be there place” is Las Vegas. Why else would Americans pay big bucks to fly to Vegas so they can visit Paris, Venice or New York, New York?

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Beachglass

I admit to being addicted.

Fortunately, my addiction is not illegal, expensive or fattening. I’m hooked on beachglass.

I discovered the wonders of beachglass at an early age. My parents would take me to one of Milwaukee’s Lake Michigan beaches where I would construct a fiefdom of sand castles and spend hours sorting shells and rocks. And then, to my sheer delight, I discovered bright jewels mixed in with the earth-toned rocks and pebbles.

Showing these priceless gems to my mother, I was informed that they were “just old beer and soda bottles polished by the sand and waves.” I was unabashed; fortunately, I could recognize beauty regardless of its provenance.

Fast forward forty-six years. My husband and I had the incredible luck to move into our new home on Lake Michigan. I found myself living in beachglass heaven.

Each year, from spring until winter when the ice shelves cover the beach, we are beachcombers. A diamond from Tiffany’s couldn’t possibly make me as happy as finding a tiny piece of RED beachglass. My husband scored a huge, elegantly smoothed piece of PURPLE beachglass on his birthday last year.

I would certainly agree with Robert Louis Stevenson, “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

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Swimming

My parents were jocks. They were not into team sports, but they believed in individual fitness.

Muscle building and gymnastic feats were my father’s forte. He could do handsprings and twirl my mom around in the air. My mother was the high diving board champ.

Both of my parents were powerful swimmers. When we visited my aunt’s lake cottage, their idea of a good swim was across the lake.

My mother was also a Red Cross swimming instructor. She taught women who were afraid of water. Her success rate at teaching the terrified to swim was impressive.

And then I came along. What a disappointment my lack of athletic ability must have been to my parents!

My mother began my swimming lessons. The harder I tried to please her, the faster I sank. She had visions of my perfect Australian crawl stroke, but I more closely resembled a mixmaster gone berserk. This sorry state of affairs lasted about three years. Finally, one day, my mother gave up on me. “I’ll teach you the lazy man’s stroke,” she sadly said. There would be no gold swim medals for her daughter.

I’m happy to report that if I fell out of a boat today, I could save myself. The sidestroke may be for us unathletic types, but it certainly does the trick for survival and fun in the water.

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