Road Legal

I have invented a new traffic violation. DUC. Driving Under the influence of Children.

As some of you may know, the transmission in our Suburban has, after weeks of failing health, officially committed Sudoku. Or something like that. The boys and I had gone to Walmart for a day of high class shopping, when it started to make funny noises. I rationalized said noises as being a product of the cold weather and high winds, because I am a mechanic, and went to church that night anyway. I guess that turned out to be a blessed decision, because that meant that when the transmission kicked it, our friend/babysitter/guardian angel Susan K. was right behind us on the road. Long story short (too late), we managed to limp it home with Susan following, and when we got there, she rolled down her car window and said, "I already called Wayne (her husband) and he said it was fine if you borrow this car for a while, so I'll pick you up in the morning and then you can drive it home after work tomorrow." Now you see why I call her my guardian angel.

So, with extreme gratitude, I took her up on her offer and have been driving her car for a little over a week. I've been trying not to drive it any more than necessary, but last Friday night, after work, I decided to make a run to Tractor Supply and Kohls to do some Christmas details. Don't ask. Well, a couple of details turned into ten minutes in Tractor Supply, then one hour at the Gerbil Tubes, then heaven-only-knows how long at Kohls, then, finally, Meijer. It was about 10:30 when we started home, which, in our second-shift life, is not too too late. But I was tired, and my hair was standing up in spikes from my fingers running through it, and Abe was uttering intermittant shrieks and giggles, with Charlie alternately making faces at him and hitting him with things...

Good times.

On top of this, the car was still unfamiliar. It has more quiet power than what I'm used to, as well as slightly squishy steering. So I was snarking at the kids, babysitting the speedometer, driving one-handed to point out pretty Christmas lights, and going cross-eyed about the time we passed Grant's Lick. And,  you probably guessed it, on go the pretty lights in the rearview mirror.

So I pulled over, thankful that at least I did not have the breast pump going... which is something I admit I often do while driving. Wouldn't that cop have been surprised? I was so chagrinned that I didn't notice that Charlie's immediate reaction to being pulled over was to take off his seatbelt. Excellent choice.

Kentucky's Finest leaned down to peer with his flashlight in my driver's side window, and I completely forgot what I had planned to say, because the first words out of his mouth were, "I think I know what the problem is."

Good grief.

He went on to tell me he'd pulled me over because I was "weaving pretty bad on him" and asked if the car was mine, to which I answered that I was borrowing it from a friend. Then he asked for my ID. Igg! "It's here somewhere," I said, then proceeded to excavate it out from the pile of coats, diaper bags, shopping bags, and general chaos in the passenger seat. He gave it a cursory glance, told us to be careful, told Charlie to put on his seatbelt, then let us go. Thank God highway patrolmen don't like to give tickets to chubby, harried-looking women with two small children in the back seat. As we pulled back onto the road, I told Charlie (quite calmly, I might add) that if Mommy ever got pulled over again, he had to keep his seatbelt on because Mommy could get a ticket just because he had it off. To this he replied, "I thought you were going to get arrested!"

My work is done here.

Burma Shave 2010

Not that I (or, in fact, almost anyone who would be reading this) am old enough to remember Burma Shave's roadside sign campaign that began in 1925, but I am going to revive it.

I'm going to campaign for Barbasol: the broke-mom-of-two-small-

children's choice for shaving comfort.

"If I shave

my legs at all

I shave my legs

with Barbasol.

My leg hair is

so blasted thick

I cannot shave it

with a BiC.

When I need to be

nylons-ready,

I shave my legs

with a machete."

It's gonna be big.

The Tale of the 26th Prisoner

I have officially arrived in the paraprofessional world.  "Paraprofessional" means I get paid about ten bucks an hour to do the same work it would take a pair of professionals to do. Just kidding. Actually, I love my job, with all its quirks. And on Tuesday, a co-worker and I went to a quirky workshop and I loved it.

The workshop was at KDLA in Frankfort, which stands for "Kentucky Dept. of Libraries and Archives. Vicki drove, because Frankfort is an hour and a half away, and given the state of my vehicles at the moment, there was every chance we would've ended up living there if I'd been the one to drive. Vicki driving meant I had to navigate, which is never a good thing, especially when I like the person I'm with and start talking too much to pay attention to the directions. We only got lost once, though, and in my defense, the turn we missed wasn't marked. Well, it was marked, just not with a green sign with a foot tall number "62" like I was expecting. At any rate, we didn't get very lost for very long, and Vicki didn't hit me with any blunt objects, and we'd left early-ish anyway, so we got where we were going just under the wire.

I didn't expect KDLA to be in such an idyllic setting. Frankfort isn't the largest city in Kentucky, but it is the capitol, so I expected it to be more... urban. KDLA, however, sits on a hill off to the side of the city, surrounded by wooded hills and parks, with a spectacular view of the capitol building on an adjacent hill. If I hadn't talked myself out of taking my camera with me just before I left in the morning, I'd have a better shot of that view, but here is the best that Vicki's camera phone could provide, and then a little bit better one from the web.

The KDLA building itself is an artistic looking block of concrete with three huge silos down each side that store, as I was told by the front desk attendant, sensitive documents that require climate controlled environments. And you thought librarians never did anything cool. Just inside the lobby, a visitor is presented with the Braille Library for the Blind stacks. To the right lie the Archives, ensconsed behind a guard's desk which I'll tell you about later, and a beautiful sculpture called, Kentucky in Woods, shown  at the top. This is what SLA Kentucky's newsletter says about the sculpture, "Located in the building’s main lobby is a unique sculpture by Bobby Reed Falwell. The monumental wood sculpture is made of 28 Kentucky woods and is an abstract representation of Kentucky, with the sunrise on the east and the sunset in the west. The woods came from the Estill County land of Dr. Thomas Clark, who worked with Falwell to locate each variety of tree needed for the project." That's cool, but mainly I just thought it was pretty.

The first half of the workshop was about the services offered by KDLA, most noteworthy of which is the Talking Book Library. Basically, what this program does is make audiobooks of books that mainstream companies wouldn't; i.e. a cookbook in audio form so that someone who has had a stroke and can cook just fine but can't turn the pages of a book can still try new recipes. The possibilities are endless. I love this program! Since I can't do it justice in this blog without writing a novel, I'll direct you here and here for details.

During a tasty lunch, eaten in Vicki's van to get out of the horrible cave the seminar took place in, we revelled in the wildlife experience of KDLA. No, I'm not talking about wildlife in the library/archives: they only let them in if they have all the proper forms of ID. But while Vicki and I were eating lunch, we saw a herd of five mysterious deer emerge from the woods to crop grass unabashedly by the roadside. They were mysterious because they didn't look like white-tailed deer, but my expert source, a.k.a. my husband, says there aren't any other species in Kentucky. Shortly after the herd made its appearance, it was joined by a flock of wild turkeys who I can only assume were having a last hurrah before the start of turkey season which was coming up the following Sunday. So fascinated were we by the view of distant critters that we took a drive to try to get a better look. Alas, the camera phone didn't have enough oomph to document that. I'm still kicking myself that I decided not to take my camera with me.

After lunch/safari, Vicki and I went back to the dungeon to take part in *booming voice-over* The Tale of the 26th Prisoner! This was a collection building/censorship excercise meant to illustrate the challenges that library "book selectors" face when chosing books for their collections. There were something like 80 of us library book slaves who took part in this training excercise. They split us up into six groups and we were given these instructions: You are a librarian who has committed a terrible crime. (Probably something to do with those five copies of Twilight that the library has been trying to get back since January...) Because your character has been found to be in all other ways irreproachable, you have been given a lightened sentence to serve as the librarian of a new prison island. This island is separated from the mainland by 75 miles of frigid water. You and the other inmates will be expected to be 75% self-sufficient. Two of the inmates will have children with them, because they have been found to be exemplary parents and their crimes were not violent: a nine year old boy and fourteen year old girl who have been tested to reveal genius level IQ, and one seven year old severely autistic boy who excels at art and music. The children must pass the same standardized tests as other children their ages or they will be put into foster care and their parents put in a maximum security prison on the mainland. One woman is pregnant. The other prisoners range from seven to eighty one years of age and represent all major ethnic groups and world religions, both genders, and all sexual orientations. You must select ten books to meet the needs listed above, but... The governor of the island will vet all books being brought in and will not allow any books containing violence, sexual descriptions or images, religious ideas, or any ideas deemed to be of an inflamatory nature. If the governor disallows more than three of your choices, you will be put in solitary confinement for life.

Needless to say, we should've just chosen one title and had done with it: Catch 22. That's obviously what the situation was: it is impossible to meet all the above needs without breaking some of the above rules. No history books: violence. But what about the standarized tests? No medical books: naughty pictures. But what about the pregnant woman? And you can just forget about any novels with the above rules... You get the idea. After the scrutiny of the governor, my group had only three books left, five out of six groups were in solitary confinement forever, and I was chanting, "Revolution! Revolution!" The presenters did tell us that we must be the good kids that our directors allow to leave the library because every other time they had led this workshop, at least one group said, "We want a book on boat building..."

After much hilarity and being shipped off to solitary confinement forever and ever, Vicki and I decided to stop in at the Archive room. Getting into the Archives is much like getting into Canada used to be: it can be done without a passport, but we had to have two forms of ID, sign away our firstborn chilren, and make extra certain to put our middle initials on all blanks asking for our names. Sheesh. All we wanted was to take a look at the portfolio of the Packhorse Libraries, which Vicki had read about in Down Cut Shin Creek.  The Packhorse Libraries were a program of the W.P.A. in Kentucky during the Great Depression. These intrepid librarians would take books in satchels on horseback to the remote settlements and camps of Appalachia where the poor families would receive them with great excitement. Because the culture of the area and time was such that these families didn't feel right about taking something without giving something in return for it, even if it was a loaned library book, these families would often give the librarians something of personal value, like a family recipe or a scrap for a quilt. The librarians then began to make scrapbooks of these items, which eventually became a highly valued part of their cirulated materials, passed on from family to family around the region. What Vicki and I were hoping to see was one of these actual scrapbooks, but either through miscommunication or because the scrapbooks are not actually kept at KDLA, what we ended up seeing was a folder of photographs of the Packhorse Libraries, a couple of which are  shown here. When we left the Archives, we were told that KDLA actually has a signature of Abraham Lincoln's, amongst other valuable articles. And the themesong from Mission Impossible started playing in my head...

Thanksgiving

The week of Thanksgiving dawned foggy at the Holler. Not that fog isn’t picturesque, but it doesn’t make me think Thanksgiving, so I was glad to be going out of town. On Monday before the big day, my mom and brother came to pick up the boys and me for a week’s stay at Midmile Farm-- the old stomping grounds in Indiana. My brother and sister-in-law had flown in from New Mexico a few days before, so it was to be a nuclear family reunion.

Of course, a trip to Grandma’s house is ever an opportunity for Charlie to discover how many different playgrounds the world has to offer. We got in late on Monday night, and after a day in the car, Charlie went to sleep even later than usual. As chance would have it, he also woke up early Tuesday morning with a nose bleed, so Grandma and I formed a plan to flat wear him out that day. The first park we visited was the VFW playground in Columbia City. It is a paradise of wooden wonder that makes me wish I was a few feet shorter, a lot of pounds lighter, and at least twice as energetic. It was a chilly day, but we played as long as we could before going home to Grandma’s to make lasagna. After a day of running in the cold and very little sleep, Charlie still managed to keep himself awake until the end of the movie he was watching: 10:30 p.m. I don’t know what it is about sleep these stubborn Pearson males dislike so, but after the movie was done, he fell asleep faster than I’ve ever seen.

Wednesday morning, Charlie didn’t quite wake up all the way. He zommed his way down to breakfast, but quickly gave up on sitting upright, and went to nap on the couch, sleeping the morning away until 1:30 p.m. This was enough for me to decide he must have strep; it was so out of character for him. So just for a little vacation fun, we visited ReadyMed. No strep. I guess we just wore him out a little better than we intended to.

Thursday was, of course, the big day. What Thanksgiving would be complete without the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or, as my sister-in-law Susan and I came to call it, “Where Celebrities Go To Die.” My eyebrows hit my hairline first during the performance by Alan Cumming, who closely resembles nothing so much as a strung-out, gay elf. A little while later, I was wowed by Cindy Lauper, looking like she had spray painted hot pink stripes on an albino ferret and Superglued it to her head. About the last thing I saw was what appeared to be duet between Miley Cyrus’s doppelganger and Kermit the Frog. I went to Thanksgiving dinner thinking, Well, that really puts the “Ummm...” in “awesome.” Dinner was, of course, fantastic. Perfectly slow roasted turkey, Mom’s signature cranberry salad, sourdough rolls, au gratin potatoes, stuffing, pies... And a new dish: Mom’s Spontaneous Cajun-style Blackened Green Bean Casserole... which happens when an overworked cook forgets the beans are still in the oven. Seriously, though, if I ate that well every day of the year, they could fill me with helium and float me along with Snoopy and Buzz Lightyear in the Macy’s Parade.

A little while after lunch, Uncle Joel took Charlie for a run/ chase/ mudfest/ exercise in futility which I, sadly, missed while giving Abraham a nap. The futility part came in when Charlie tried to catch Uncle Joel. I think it was good for him. It’s not often Charlie’s will gets bested. The mudfest... well, as you can see here, we didn’t escape the unfestive, non-crisp yet still beautiful fall weather.

The rest of the week blurred by, with a couple more parks thrown in, a trip to see some Christmas lights, and a shopping escapade at Michael’s Crafts. I’ve never been dragged out of a store by my collar before, but I think the experience was good for me. Temporary insanity happens I see a wall of beads marked “50% Off.” What can I say?

On the way back to the Holler on Sunday, Grandma, the boys, and I crammed a five hour trip into seven hours. Grandma jury-rigged the little dvd/tv so that it wouldn’t shut off every 5 seconds. Charlie watched movies, looked at books, played Leapster, and in general complained very little. Abe slept and also complained very little. Grandma drove, and I only complained when I started to get queasy, which was in no way intended to be a comment on Mom’s driving. We stopped at a school playground in Eden, IN for an hour long fifteen minute break. May I just say that playgrounds are way cooler now than when I was a kid? Here is what Mom looks like after a week with my children... We had supper at LaRosa’s, and got in at the tidy time of 5:00 p.m., in time for Grandma and Grandpa to turn right around and drive home again. Super(grand)parents! Any ideas what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving?

To Distraction

Abraham's hair was getting shaggy. Of course, it was cute the way his forelock hung down over his eyes. Pretty much anything is cute on a baby; hair sticking out every which way being no exception. But I just kept thinking that, if I were him, I'd be annoyed to have hair tickling my ears, my neck, my forehead.... Not to mention that less hair means less water being dumped over his head to rinse it, which, from his point of view would have to be a good thing, right? So I decided it was time for Abe's first haircut with the clippers. I've trimmed him up with scissors from time to time, but this would be the first time I cut the whole shebang.

And it went well. It tickled; he put is arms up and giggled. I managed to dodge little flailing arms and buzz buzz buzz that hair off. He hung over the side of his high chair to watch the pile grow. "Hey, she's stealing my hair! There it is!" This made cutting the back of his head easy. And when I was all done, viola, cute as ever.

Then I decided Charlie needed a haircut. But I hadn't figured all the elements of the equasion. Element one: Charlie has much more, much thicker hair than Abraham. Element two: I had forgotten to oil the clippers. Element three: I've never given a haircut with an almost-one-year-old hanging on my pant leg before.

So I'm buzzing away at the back of Charlie's head, and nothing much seems to be happening. That's when I remembered the oil. So I popped the 5/8 inch comb off of the clippers, oiled them up, all the while having to repeat, "Charlie, stay there! This will only take a minute. Then you'll get a treat! CHARLIE, STAY THERE!!"

And on my leg is Abraham, going, "A-YA-YA-YA-YA-YA! MA-MA-MA! BAH-BAH-BAH!" at his most plaintive volume. So I picked him up an plunked him in his high chair to watch the shearing process. Then I went back to the clippers.

Buzz! There go the clippers, slick as butter through a swath of hair up the side of Charlie's head... without the 5/8 inch comb on them.... "OH CRAP! I'M STUPID!" Yes, I did actually yell that in front of my two children.

And Charlie jumped up out of the chair going, "What!? What's wrong!? Is thur bweed!?"

Erm... *Trots out extremely soothing voice* "No, honey. Mommy just cut too much hair off... It's okay. Sit back down."

 (You're just going to look like a Neo-Nazi midget. No big deal.)

Later, after we'd gone to church that night, and Charlie had explained to anyone and everyone, loudly, and with great detail that Mommy screwed his hair up on accident, we were driving home. Solemnly, he turned to me and said, "Mommy, you have to pay attention."

Yes, I guess so.

A Funny Thing Happened to Me

...at the library. A couple of funny things, actually.

For anyone who doesn't know, I've been a part time aide at my local library for the last... erm... two and a half years or so. And, working with the public, I get to see lots of funny and bizarre behavior. But yesterday, I was the bizarre one.

Every fall, we have a "staff enrichment" meeting, where we do actually do some staff enriching, but also goof off a lot. This year, the goofing off was in the form of making beaded lanyards to hold name tags. The idea was that a beaded lanyard was prettier than a pinned on name tag, and more versatile too. Our tags have our names on them, of course, and also a little "Ask me about..." blurb where we can share our particular interests. Since beading is my particular hobby, I got really carried away with the lanyard-making part, and made myself six or so. That was a couple of weeks ago, so now whenever I'm at work, I'm wearing my lanyard and badge.

Yesterday, one of our public access computers had been acting up all day. More accurately, the patrons had been logging off of it wrong all day long and I kept having to fix it for every new patron. So when one patron had just left computer 4 and another sat down to log on, I was at the circulation desk twiddling with something or other. Suddenly I heard my name. The girl at computer 4 was calling, "Hannah? I need some help." I peered at her. She didn't look like anyone I knew. So, trying to look professional and absolutely NOT clueless, I went over to help her, all the while thinking, how does she know my name!?

Blonde. Moment.

Later that same day, I was inputing interlibrary loan requests into the database we use for such things, when I came to a request for a book that there was no way to get. It was only available from five sources in the U.S., three of which were booksellers, and two of which were inactive. Long story short: this book would not be coming in. So I called the patron.

Me: Is Kathy there?

Man Who Answered: No, this is her husband, can I help?

Me: This is the Pendleton County Library calling to tell her that the book she'd requested through interlibrary loan is not going to be possible to get. It's just that the availability is too limited, I'm afraid.

Him: I remember her saying something about a book. What was the title?

Me: *squirming* Uh... well... it's called, Give Him Back His Balls actually so... er...

Awkward.

November

Is it honestly November? It must be. The leaves have finished falling, and the light that so many poets have called "the golden light of Autumn" has faded. But not before I got a good picture of it.

We've had such a weird year, climatologically speaking, here in the holler. The summer was cooler and a whole lot wetter than we've been used to which, in perfect accordance to Murphy's Law, meant our riding mower broke down resulting in our yard looking like an ungrazed pasture. Even August did not bake us with its usual supernova, and now that autumn is almost on its way out, I feel I can safely say we've skipped over this year's "Indian summer." I'm not complaining, but I do wonder if we're going to get as much snow this winter as we did rain over the summer.

We've been stacking up wood for the winter, and generally battening down the hatches around here. Back during the summer, God gave us a gift of readily available firewood, when He blew the bark off of a tree just over the hill from our house during a lightning storm. It was about eight a.m. one day, which for the Pearson household equates to "too early to be awake" when a tremendous BOOM rattled the windows and caused Charlie to levitate and air-run into our bedroom. Later that day, we took a walk and found the lightning-struck tree not fifty yards from our house. Viola, the search for this year's wood is over.

Maybe, though, Sunday was this year's version of Indian summer. The day was a sunny, breezy seventy-something degrees, so we took a break from the battening to have a picnic and take a bunch of goofy pictures. Here is one of the illusive and wonderful Abrahambeast in its natural habitat.

After we explained to Lucy that "hotdogs" are not actually made from dog, she wanted to know why she had not been included in the party.

After we explained the same thing to Boots, he was no longer interested.


And after writing this entry, I'm thinking that maybe the light of November is still golden after all.

Red, White, and Earl

A never ending source of both amusement and consternation are the three roosters who came to... well, roost... with us this year. For reasons that were never fully clear to me, my husband brought home three roosters from the Mayor's (see post: The Mayor of Mark Haley) house sometime in the spring. They're handsome, cocky fellows.(Boy, I'm on a roll today...) One is a Road Island, dubbed "Red," one might be a Delaware, "White." And then there's "Earl," who might either be a Maran, or a Plymouth Rock. I am almost more clever than I can handle: Earl is actually a mixture of black and white feathers but from a distance, he appears gray. Get it? At any rate, I think they were supposed to eat the ticks in our yard, and maybe they do. But mostly, they strut their stuff around the yard, crow under our windows at ungodly hours, poop all over the patio, and steal the other animals' food. I have a love/hate relationship with these birds. I love to look at them, but most days, I find myself hoping they get run over by one of the speeding trucks that seem to overpopulate our road.

Since it is the eve of Halloween, I'll dedicate the rest of this post to the strange interaction between our roosters and our jack-o-lanterns. Kid number one and I went to Walmart last week, after three solid weeks of being pestered at every grocery store to buy pumpkins, and bought our carvers. There had to be a big "daddy" pumpkin, a fat "mommy" pumpkin, a little "kid-sized" pumpkin, and a "baby" pumpkin. We carved the first two on Monday and Tuesday nights this week. Kid wanted the daddy pumpkin to be a mad face and the mommy one to be a sad face. Psychology? So they were gutted, carved, lit, and set out in accordance with his wishes. The next morning, when I went out to set the garbage out by the road, I witnessed the carnage. The mommy pumpkin had been viciously pecked around it's forelock, teardrop, nose, mouth, and one eye. At first, I was inclined to be annoyed, but the more I looked at it, the more Halloween-appropriate it seemed. So I chalked it up to chicken art.

But why did the rooster peck the mommy pumpkin so badly, but only give the daddy pumpkin one good shot below one eye? Is even the spirit of daddy so intimidating?

Postscript: Since the writing of this post, Earl has gone to the great corn patch in the sky. And we still don't know exactly why the chicken crossed the road, but he did not get to the other side.

Mr. Sullivan

We all have certain things our minds just won't do. For example, I cannot, under any circumstances, spell "scene" and "screen" right without looking them up first. (If they're spelled right it's because I looked them up.) I also can't be sure of my own mother's birthday between two possible dates. And, for some reason, I can't remember Mr. Sullivan's name most of the time.

Marvin Sullivan is one of the constellations of my local system. He's a board member of the library where I work, a member of the church I go to, a near-neighbor. He knows my kids and my husband. He used to be an English teacher in the local school system before he retired, and has written a book about the county. He can be seen most days driving around town in a carriage drawn by one of his two horses. Just last week, I saw him driving up Mark Haley Rd in his little cart pulled behind his skittish rose-gray gelding. In the cart with his was "Aussie," a little dog whom I guess to be part Aussie Cattle Dog. "Your dog and your horse match," I told him, and he laughed. The man is that familiar, and yet somehow, half the times that I see him, my addled brain wants to call him, "August Something-or-other." What is that about?

I'm taking home Marvin's book tonight. Back Yonder, it's called. I'll let you know...

Fall Has Fell

Fall has fallen with a vengeance here in the hill country. Temperatures, mild all summer, came slamming down to the forties seemingly over night. Last night, I lit the wood burning stove for the second time and it is only mid-October. When I walked out the door on Thursday morning, I thought I'd been worm-holed to somewhere outside of Dublin, Ireland. The temperature was a balmy forty-two and a steady drizzle was falling. Why is it like that on the days I can't just go back to bed?

Despite the rains that have been with us all summer long (why is it perfect garden weather all summer the one summer when I can't work in a garden because I have a new baby?) and are continuing unseasonably into the Autumn, Kentucky is a beautiful as ever. The trees are beginning to turn, so that each hill is a palette of greens, yellows, oranges, and russets, with touches of bright candied cherry red. The unfortunately named "Swamp" Maples are wonderful for this cherry red shade, many of them bragging green, yellow, and red leaves all at once.

But the best thing about Fall this year is that my roosters seem to hate it. There's nothing quite so fulfilling to my day as stepping out the door into early morning's cold temperatures to be eyed resentfully by three pairs of beady little rooster eyes. They hate me because I found them roosting on my potting bench a few nights back and took a broom to them. After I hit a few fowl balls, they decided maybe they better stick to their coop, where they are freezing their feathered butts off. Sooner or later, I'll take pity on them and fit up their heat lamp, I suppose, but for now I just superimpose their scowling images over the fall foliage background in my mind's eye and laugh all the way to work.

Kentucky Wool Festival

Last weekend was the Kentucky Wool Festival, which takes place just outside of Falmouth at the fairgrounds by Kincaid Lake State Park. I have a certain prejudice against the Wool Fest, because they have the same vendors year after year and no one new can get a foot in the door except by shear (hahaha) dumb luck, but we go each year nonetheless. Why pass up an opportunity to eat funnel cakes and gyros and pay one dollar for a 12 ounce can of soda?

There's always a sheep shearing demonstration, a herd-dog demonstration, farm animals you can pet (although this is not recommended with the prize turkey who walks around puffed up and menacing all weekend and and goes home at the end of it to have a stroke), tractors you can pet, a two-stroke engine-powered corn meal grinder, a sorghum booth, a "wool" tent, homemade lye soap, a blacksmith... Any festivalish thing you can think of, except for a midway, it has. But this year's noteworthy experience was the butterfly vendor.

The butterfly vendor had all kinds and colors of butterflies in glass shadowbox frames, just as you might expect. They had single butterflies pinned behind glass, and herds or flocks pinned up together, and even bugs that, if I saw them on my wall, I would be tempted to try to kill with a baseball bat. But the thing I liked the most, and yet found myself the most disturbed by, were the earrings. Cut, laminated, and hung from french hooks were the wings of butterflies of every possible color.

As compelling as the colors were, and as unique as the concept seemed, I couldn't get past the idea that something as fragile and "innocent" as a butterfly had to die to make these. Of course, as my venerable mother pointed out, there is nothing innocent about a cabbage butterfly-- the little yellow ones that are everywhere eating the leaves of things you'd rather not have them eat-- so I consolled myself that the same must be true of other butterflies in their native habitats. Maybe, like fallen angels, butterflies are things of beauty that are evil to the core! So I wear my massacred butterfly earrings with pride. Long live the Wool Festival!

The Holler Eats Cats

Now that I've got that taken care of-- not Arabic, but Hindi, by the way-- I can get on with what I was going to say.

The Mark Haley Holler eats cats. When we moved here, we had K'Tigu. she adopted us about a week after we moved in, announcing her presence from the darkness under the car and never looking back. And though she is long gone, chased off by a mongrel whose owner should've been shot along with him, I think she will always be my favorite of our feline interlopers. Maybe it's because I could tell she liked me. She would come and sit by me out on the porch steps, but she never wanted me to pet her. This is a good thing, since I'm allergic to cats.

After her came the sibling kittens, Bob and Nightcat. Bob was the last cat even mentioned in a blog and that was months ago. When they arrived, the kittens got to live in the laundry room for a while, one inky black shadow and one jaunty gray tiger, eventually to be ousted for pooping behind the washer and dryer. They made it just fine outside for a while. Bob became "Bob" when he lost his tail in a freak accident involving high winds and a heavy door, but he never was resentful. Bob was always a lover while his dear sister was a fighter/hider/hunter. Evidently, Nightcat decided to hunt a car tire one night, however. We found her in the morning, to put it mildly, much the worse for wear.

I never knew cats mourned, but for a couple of weeks after that, Bob was not himself. He searched for her all over, repeatedly sniffing the spot where we'd found her. He wandered around keening in the most distressing fashion. Maybe Bob just had a special soul, but it seemed he never quite got over the loss of his litter-mate. Some couple of months ago, Bob departed from us for what I suppose to be good. I like to think he shacked up with a girl cat somewhere and thinks of us fondly, but maybe he left because the three roosters (fodder for another blog) were eating all of his food. Wherever you are, Bob, may the road rise up to meet you and all that jazz.

Between losing Nightcat and losing Bob, we had two kitten friends that didn't last long. One was Noodle, named and given by a neighbor. He got stuck in a tree across the street in the underbrush where I couldn't get to him and might've become a snack for an owl. He was a rather small kittie. After him, there was a kitten so tiny it prompted my mother to look up dwarfism in cats. He/she never got a name, though I toyed with several. This kitten had the most astonishing fir: long, and black, but shot through with even longer pewter colored fir so that he looked like he'd stolen the coat off of a silverback gorilla. At eight plus weeks, little Pewter was no larger than my hand and he never got any bigger. But whether heartworms or genetic defects got him, the little one was not with us for more than a month, and that was one of the least fun things I've ever had to explain to a four year old.

So we were catless for a time, and thinking we ought to remain that way, until the night when, returning home from work, I almost ran over a friendly kitten. When I got out of the car to chase her away, the little one trotted up to me and said, in kitteneze, "You're mine now, sucker!" When we got her home and saw her in the light of day, this kitten was the spitting image of Bob. Charlie christened her "Daisy" and we like to think she was sent by her sire to take care of us.

Shortly after that, two gray-eyed, orange wildcats took up residence behind the library where I work. Rather than have them be run over, I lured them out with Chinese food (works every time...) and took them home. We didn't even have the chance to name them before one disappeared. The other, dubbed "Boots" by my husband is still skittish. How not, when the dog and the three stupid roosters think it is a sport to follow the poor fellow around looking hungry? We'll see how long these two last. Eight cats, three years, two survivors... we're a B-grade reality show in the making!

थे होलर एअट्स Cats

my title line appears in what i can only assume is arabic. why?
and perhaps more curious: why does arabic not have a word for "cats?"

many changes since i began

there have been many changes since i began blogging about life at the holler, not the least of which is the amount of time i have to blog on any given day. maybe it isn't so much the time as the brain power that has been next-to-nil, but the evidence is how little this blog has grown in the past couple of years.

what has grown is my family. the munchkin is four now, and going for a spot in guinness's book as world's most stubborn boy. *digression* is there a connection between guinness book and guinness beer? he is in preschool as we wobble precariously into another year in the kentucky hills. i wonder how best to keep him interested in the wonders of outdoor kentucky. already he asks me just as often if he can watch a movie right when we get home from school as he does if we can go out and play. but there are so many things i want him to know, like how chlorophyll works, and what a grub is. the difference between a bluebird, a blue jay, and an indigo bunting. camping, fishing, swimming... how do i do all this with him and a new baby?

because that is the newest change at the holler. we are joined, as of november 30, by a new baby boy, a soul of tranquility and cheerfulness. when he is with me, he is the calmest baby i have ever seen, content to watch the world around him and delighted by all it contains.

also joining us is bob, the taleless cat. alas, tigu was chased off by the erstwhile neighbor's yellow dog. we hope she is somewhere living fat and sassy. as for us, it is a new world we enter this summer, with a larger family and bigger dreams. soon to come: the tuckymisfit garden.

something you don't see every day

it has been way too long since i blogged anything. i admit to finding less to expound about from the holler in winter, but that's no excuse.

this winter and subsequent spring have been banner seasons for the heading above, starting with a freak snowstorm in early march. as my paternal unit put it, you usually see headlines on weatherchannel.com that say, "major storm heading in south of cincinnati." in this case it was "the storm front is south and east of I-69" and was it ever! a wall of muffling white that stretched from cleveland, ohio to the southern reaches of tennessee, dumping its worst on us here in rural kentucky. twelve to fifteen inches, they said, and i scoffed. but the snow started to fall on friday morning. by the brief lull around 2:00 in the afternoon, a fluffy six inches was on the ground, soon to be coated by a thin layer of freezing rain. the snow picked up again that night, and by morning, darned if we didn't have the fifteen plus inches they'd threatened us with. and though it had effectively cancelled some plans, it was difficult to be grumpy watching two goofy dogs and a three year old try to manuver through snow up to their bellies and knees respectively. so we tried sledding and snow boarding down our hill, thankfully with minimal casualties. we tried snowballs, but they didn't pack. we built the requisite snow man, whom the dogs later killed. the munchkin looked out the window the next day, as the snow was already half-way melted, and said, "the snowman is dead!" the dogs had knocked him down. thus was our here-and-then-gone snow storm in the first week of march.

apparently the heavens hadn't unleashed enough precipitation on us. after last summer's drought, winter has been an irony of rain, continuing hale and hearty into spring. last week, after five straight days of rain, the river crested a foot short of flood stage on the side of town where the library sits. houses along the riverbank found themselves suddenly more like lake front property. i can only imagine looking out the back windows of those houses at the brown water that had swallowed half of their back yards and asking themselves, "do we pack up now, or will it go back down again." recede it did. leaving behind more debris than it took with it. and still april has been rainy and temperamental: good for my cistern, but giving the folks in town more than their fair share of headaches.

and speaking of headaches... tax season brought me to the library early on sunday morning to make use of the fast internet connection and turbotax online. as i drove, dread-filled and half-asleep, towards town something caught my eye atop a farm gate on three loop road. this is a small plot of land with the most spectacular assortment of animals. pygmy goats mill in with the horses, and some of the most amazingly plumed and tufted black and while chickens occasionally stray into the road from this house. but the most extravagant attraction this morning was what looked like a gate-post that had sprouted willow-like branches right out of its top in the dawn-light. i rubbernecked shamelessly, slowing down to observe this phenomenon, and found that it wasn't a post gone to seed, but rather a peacock sleeping with is head under one wing and his rainbowed plumes hanging down behind him. just as though he felt my scrutiny, his head came out from under wing to watch me drive past, and i could have sworn his expression said, "what? isn't this a perfectly normal place to sleep?"

a bird of a different color

new birds to report at the holler. the most consistent feeders now are a small group of rose breasted grosbeaks; three males and a female. these are larger than finches, but not as big as jays, with black back plumage white bellies, white wing markings, and breasts so red they’re almost fucia. i have also seen the occasional red winged black bird picking around under my apple tree. the real excitement came today, however, when i saw an oriole of some kind nibbling at the suet cage i have hung from the shepherds hook three feet outside my window. at first i thought he was a finch, but on closer look, he was too big for a finch, and his yellow was so amber it was almost orange. he also gave a very gay, trilling call. i hope to see him again soon. also, if i haven’t mentioned it, there’s a mourning dove nesting atop my clematis arbor with two little eggs. she’s a brave little mommy who doesn’t fly away even when i come peer at her from three feet away on the ridge behind her nesting spot.
now that i’m done driving the worm population of my yard crazy by digging up their happy homes, i am seeing the fruits of my labor. the flowers are popping up nicely in my pots and around my flag pole. everything is a bit later in the bed by the garage because i had to dig it up and re-lay the brick wall around it first. but hopefully in a months time, i’ll have some lavish flowers to show. now on to the destruction of the beds gone to seed around the arbor and the second drive. vegetables will be coming last this year dependent upon my neighbor to plow the plot for them. i feel a regular green thumb... now to see if it will actually grow or not...

retraction

The "Red Bellied Woodpecker" does, in fact, have a small red patch on its belly, just before its tail. While it does have a white breast, my previous blog was mistaken in taking umbridge with the name "red breasted woodpecker" because that, in fact, is not its name.
The Cardinal/Wren lovechild may, in fact, be a Purple Finch. In this case, I once again have to wonder at the naming of birds. According to Mr. Audobon, the Purple finch is brown in its body feathers with a maroon head that turns more reddish in the summer. So where does the purple come in?

autobiography installment I

I was born on November the twenty-third, 1979, at Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie, Indiana. I was too young to remember it at the time, so there’s not much I can tell you about that. All I really know about it comes from threats and insinuations my mother made over the years. Threat: “When you were born, you came out the wrong way-- face up. You gave me back labor. Just wait until you have babies.” Insinuation: I somehow did this on purpose to cause her pain. Threat: “The doctor said you had a head bigger than ninety-five percent of babies. Just wait until you have babies.” Insinuation: Well, I don’t know. Perhaps the thought is that my head is still bigger than ninety-five percent of heads out there; a thesis supported by the fact that ninety-five percent of pairs of sunglasses I try on squeeze my head unbearably. I think I’m getting off point.
My parents are not classical reminisce-ers. In addition to what Mom told me about my being born, Dad told me that he was surprised by me. I have an older brother, the advent of whom apparently convinced Dad that only male babies come out that particular chute. Thus, the introduction of a girl was of some small shock to him. I guess he got over it eventually.
It was actually my older brother who had the most adjusting to do. When I was brought home from the hospital, he was an eager two year old. “Can I hold it?” he asked. But I think he quickly found what a trial baby sisters can be. Perhaps the first time Mom took one of his toys away because he bashed me with it, he had some inkling of the difficulties of siblingdom, but I think the aggravation really set in when I was old enough to talk and insisted on calling him “Joelly” every time I addressed him.
Other than these few shared recollections, my first couple of years were largely uneventful. The usual diapers were changed, blankies were loved, smashed foods were gummed, and I grew. When I was about sixteen months old, my maternal grandfather succumbed to a heart attack, to the surprise of my family. He was quite young when he went, and my mother says that it was a comfort of sorts to have me toddling around, babbling at the funeral. But this, like other early events, is only an image in my imagination.
Somewhere in the space of those early years, I split my head open on one of Joelly’s toy trucks and had to have stitches. I also fell in love with my elderly neighbor’s miniature house. Not that they lived in a miniature house, but they had a miniature house full of miniature items that I loved to look at, to the point of venturing over there to look at them once when I was about three without first telling Mom where I was going. I guess you could say I ran away, but only next door. This is an incident I do have strange, waivery memories of. It seems as though I look at my small self through air that shimmers like it does rising off of the pavement on a very hot day. The living room ceiling in Jim and Treeva’s was textured with precise, swirled brushstrokes, and I have an impression of the room being blue. I recall the doll’s house in a small room off of the living room that may have had yellow walls. I was fascinated with the small house with its tiny chairs and little light fixtures, but I had a strong impression that I must not touch it. Instead I watched it with a hushed reverence that only very small children truly have. I also remember being aware that I might hurt Treeva’s feelings if I seemed to be there only to see the doll’s house, and trying to show interest in Treeva herself out of a sense of politeness. But I wonder where these memories come from. They don’t seem like thoughts of a three or four year old mind, and yet I couldn’t have been any older.
I don’t remember much about the home I lived in before the age of five. It was on the corner of Nebo Road and I-don’t-know-what. There was a mulberry tree on one end of the house. There was a garden with a small shed out back. A woods bordered the property. There were huge pine trees around the neighbor’s house, and I often saw dragonflies there.
My bedroom at Nebo road had Cookie Monster-Blue carpet, and was the first door on the right down the hall from the living room. In that bedroom, I used to have recurring dreams. One was a nightmare wherein I would walk out into the living room and suddenly from all angles giant donut-like objects would roll towards me and try to smash me. They were colorful, and always rolled in the same pattern in the dream. They seemed to emerge like ghosts from within the furniture rather than hide behind or under it. I would run away from the donuts in a set pattern, finally escaping from the living room to find Mom doing dishes at the sink in the kitchen.
Did I have these dreams more often when I was sick? I remember having what Mom called “adrenaline attacks” when I was sick as a child. Always during these attacks, the room seemed to distort. Suddenly the door would seem to be hundreds of feet away, and I unable to move. I lay disconnected from my body in my bed above the blue carpet feeling painful fear until Mom came and with calm in her very presence.

the bird tree

spring came and went again in mid-march at the haley holler. we were granted a brief respite from forty degree temperatures and rain. two weeks of shorts and tee shirt weather fooled all of us. i into planting flowers. the birds into coming back to the wooded countryside. i love the birds in northern ‘tucky. we all seem to revel equally in the benevolent warmth of springtime. it is a warmth that makes one forget that the air yet to come in late summer will drive us all into hiding with its choking, steaming humidity. still, though this fake spring induced fits of gardening optimism, i knew it was too early for the hummingbird feeders to go back out. even so, i found myself longing for birds. as a result, the tree in the front of my house has sprouted no less than three bird feeders; two with “song bird mix” and one just for the finches.
finches are not shy about visiting a well placed bird feeder, it turns out. they also like other seeds beside just thistle seed. on any given day, i can peer out my corner window at something like twenty goldfinches.
the songbird food has broadened the color range beyond the dandelion yellow of the finches. i got it hoping for cardinals, but i was in for a surprise. cardinals have come, but not as many as i thought might. in their stead, i have a faithful contingent of sparrows, cowbirds (a type of swallow with a dull brown head and handsomely glossy blue-black wings), mourning doves, and one lone blue gray nuthatch; ever amusing as his makes his way down the tree trunk head first to pick seed from the grass.
the real triumph of the songbird seed has been the woodpeckers. there are three magnificent orange headed, black and white backed “red-breasted woodpeckers” who delight me by hanging comically from the bottom of the feeders, craning their necks for seed. why they’re called red-breasted, i have no idea, since their breasts are white and their crowns red-orange, but that is what mr. audobon says, and i have no choice but to believe him.
i gave myself credit for a smart tactical stroke when i saw the blue jays had found the feeders. blue jays are big and often bullies for all their pretty coloring, but evidently three feeders in on tree are enough to satisfy even the greediest jay. they make the finches flit, but they don’t bestir themselves to chase anyone off.
perhaps my favorite bird of the motley flock that i’m currently feeding is the one i can’t identify. it’s the size of a finch, with a plain brown body like a common house finch. the delightful thing about it is its brick red head, complete with a tiny crest as though a cardinal and a wren had an illicit love child. true to form, i have only seen this bird once, and only one of them at that. perhaps the cardinal/wren theory is gaining strength?

meal worms

everyone knows the old axiom that goes, “when it rains, it pours.” the current ‘tucky winter is taking this to extremes, if you ask me. it is cold today, and has been for a few days, but for two or maybe three weeks before that, we experienced a steady, soggy fifty five degree rain that turned even the hilly part of our yard to a swamp. they call this a “mild southern winter.” ‘mild’ here means ‘miserable.’
despite the sogginess, one day amongst those blurred days of rain put me in mind of another axiom. this one goes, “every cloud has a silver lining.” in this case, it was more like a slimy lining composed of earthworms. at least, i assume it was the earthworms driven to the surface by the water that brought the birds.
as i watched the endless drizzle out the corner window of my kitchen, something blue shot through my vision. drawing closer to peer out at the little tree in front of the house, i saw that the blue streak was on of my favorite red breasted blue birds, come to rest on the anchor cable of our light pole. he wasn’t alone. five glorious blue birds sat either in the tree, or on the ground pecking at the juicy morsels driven to the surface. they flitted around, puffed up against the damp chill, like animated sapphires, unaware of their observer inside the window.
after that day, i decided that continuous rain is not totally miserable. the abundance of wriggling gourmet meals on top of the ground has since invited a small flock of robins to my little tree, and, another day, five fantastically bright cardinals. maybe i should fill my bird feeders with worms instead of seeds.