MANNA FROM HEAVEN

Okay, so who really knows what manna was from heaven?

When I saw this humongous 3.2 pound mushroom (pictured above) in my back yard, I got a glimpse. I know . . . I know . . . this rounded phenomenon came from a lot of rain,and my ground being recently aerated beforehand. But I just read in Exodus 16:14 that the children of Israel who were hungry and complained to Moses about being starved to death in the wilderness were told to check out the ground every morning after the dew had done its thing and then “gone up”. When they looked, they beheld “a small round thing”. Don't you love it!! They didn't know what it was and I can hear them now . . .

“Hey, man, like what in the heck is that little round thing all over the ground?”
“I don't know, Dude, but I almost stepped on a trillion of 'em when I went to the loo.”
“I'm starved. Hey . . . let's eat one.”
“Check it out, Dude!! Try one or a billion”.
“I'm stuffed.”
“What do you reckon it is?”
“Man, uh, I don't know.”
“That's it! Let's call it Manna!”
“Awesome!!!”

Then, lucky them, they got to eat Quail at night, but don't you know they couldn't remain thankful and began to complain about the manna from heaven.

Some folks just can't be happy no matter what!

Of course, I am being facetious. All I really wanted to do was to show you how big my mushroom was that I found in my back yard and took a picture of it looking like a big, fresh-out-of-the-oven loaf of bread.

BTW, does anyone know what kind of mushroom it is and can I eat it . . . with quail?


© nancy 9.27.2009

 

FALL

Someone told me that today is the first day of Fall. Here in my hometown it came in just right . . . all cloudy and wet after a good night's rain. In fact, today was preceded by a day and a night of cool air devoid of humidity. It made me feel like pumpkins should be sprouting out into sparkling carriages and little goblins should soon be at my doorstep with trick or treat bags in hand.

Weeding the vegetable garden seemed like a good idea, so I pulled up the huge (and I do mean huge) watermelon vine, which filled up two garbage cans, that I hauled out to the curb. It was a treat because it yielded three taste-worthy melons ready to cleanse the body. I cracked one open and took all the 'meat' out of it and put the chunks in a big Ziploc bag to rest and think about its short life before it found its way into my stomach. There's still some okra and some cherry tomatoes as well as some eggplant hanging out for my consumption. Lots of fresh basil of the sweet and lemon variety, some fennel, bay, lavender, rosemary, and thymes to make dishes more savory. Autumn clematis, which looks like it should adorn a wedding veil, hangs instead from a tree like a white waterfall off a cliff. Some beautiful pink and orange concoctions from a Heart's Bursting plant survived the dear deer that like to eat it before it can flower in all its glory. The butterflies and fat hummingbirds still hover over the deep purple Buddleia and the huge cannas that one of my daughters dug up from her yard and passed on to me. When she comes over, she marvels at how big they have gotten and I marvel as well. I think I must have double green thumbs and the luck of the Irish ta boot (being 1/4 Scot/Irish as my mom is proud to admit).

In fact, I picked up my precious 91 year old mother today, and we took a ride down one of the widest streets here in Raleigh to see if the leaves were changing. We noticed that the dogwoods were cooperating. Soon the crape myrtles will follow and all the rest. We are hoping to have a really good show because we have had a summer not like last summer's drought. Lots of rain. Yum yum.

Not looking forward to all the leaves, though, especially since I have three gigantic oaks out front. I affectionately call them my Guardians as they stand majestically out my front windows as if to ward off evil. They lasted through Hurricane Fran, so I know they will be with me for as long as I get to stay in this house. I am hoping it will be a very long time.


ta ta summer


© nancy 9.22.2009

X's

It's hard to wash the X out of your clothes.

Here you are, divorced, and you feel as if a big X is marked across your chest. You go to church, to the grocery store, to work and that X is flashing in a neon sort of way letting the world know that you failed.

Big time.

You feel that even your license plate transforms into an “X” so that those driving in your vicinity can keep their distance as if you were in a Student Driver car situation and didn't know the rules of the road.

Great.

You hear everyone say, “It wasn't your fault. You're better off without him/her.” Etcetera, etcetera. Blah, blah, blah.

Uh-huh. Right.

But you know that your children would be better off with their family intact because then they may not have felt as if they were tossed out of a boat during a storm and no one threw them a life raft. You know that they probably felt as if they were treading water for no fault of their own and the sharks in the dark were circling. But you were in no shape to help them because you were in the shark's teeth trying to save your own life . . . such as it was.

Somehow or other you were able to swim to shore and gasp for breath on dry land. Exhausted. But now what do you do?

You look around. This doesn't look the same. You're on a different island and you have nothing. What to do? What to do?

Think Swiss Family Robinson.

Okay, so they had their whole family dashed together on shore and were able to rebuild their lives as a whole. And lookey there . . . God even brought a girl to the island to answer the dilemma of, “How are we going to survive and extend our existence on this land?” Not only were they able to rescue an organ for music, clothes, and sails to make clothes, foodstuff, books, an ostrich, but also a donkey! Who knew?

So . . . hang in there.

 Sooner or later the sun will shine and fade that big 'ol X on your shirt. It may not fade it completely. You may have to physically cut it out of your life, I mean your T-shirt, with a pair of scissors.

But it's easier to wash or cut out an X off your clothes than bleach the emotions out of your heart.

© nancy 9.14.2009

NINE ELEVEN

Today we are all remembering where we were the instant we heard.
How can we forget?
We shouldn't.

My children were safely sent off to school and I was preparing for my day when my mother called me and told me to turn on my TV.

I barely left it for the next two to three weeks.

My husband and I had been to Switzerland on a two-week vacation. We had been separated but had gotten back together, so this trip was special to me. The first week was with a hiking group that my husband liked to do with a friend. While the group hiked for 4-6 hours per day, I hung out at the Haus and took pictures of the beautiful little village of S-charl where we stayed every night. The next week we took off by ourselves seeing wonderful places aboard the trains. One stop was Zermatt which fascinated me since seeing a Disney movie called 'Third Man on the Mountain' when I was younger. It is not as well known as some of the other Disney movies but one of my favorites nonetheless.

With my mind full of scenic visions and my floor scattered with memorabilia and photos, I was about to put together a scrapbook of our venture across the ocean. Later, I began to see just how lucky we were to have been on a plane coming back to America on the 30th of August.

But right then the phone rang and all I could do was sit in front of the TV with my mouth open, my eyes wide, and pray, barely able to think of anything else. All else paled in comparison and life was reduced down to its simplest form.

Life and death.

Every day I prayed for survivors to be rescued and prayed they would hang on until someone, who was brave, risked their own life to go in all the rubble and find them. I never want to see anyone jump out of a building again. My tears were nothing compared to those who lost loved ones.

I pray for the children left without parents.
I pray for wives left without their husbands.
I pray for husbands left without their wives.
I pray for parents who lost their children and who are now taking care of their grandchildren.
I pray for families who were ripped apart when all they wanted to do was to be together.

It's not fair.


© nancy 9.11.2009

SUPERMAN

I used to watch a show on T.V. on Sunday nights. It was called “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”. I came back to it week after week for the romance. I was hooked. (Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain really put on a show and let the sparks fly . . . not to mention the rest of the crew.) And God bless you, Deborah Joy LeVine, for a wonderful script.

After all, what woman wouldn't want to BE Lois? I pictured myself in her shoes as she was being constantly rescued by Superman. The dumb-dumb didn't know that he was really Clark Kent. Duh!!! Take off his glasses and put some on, Lois!

But Clark was the real deal. He did what every woman with a romantic soul wanted . . . he listened.

He gave Lois his undivided attention and actually looked into her eyes while he listened. Yum.

And he said all the right words. Melt.

And he let Lois be Lois and fell in love with her in spite of herself. Mmmmmm. Triple Yum Yum.

Finally, her eyes were opened after years of steady Clarkdom and she realized that her hero lived within her best friend.

So. all you guys out there, go out and rent all the seasons of 'Lois and Clark', absorb every episode (the ones before they got different writers and it began to fall apart), and get your Superman on.

Better yet . . . get your Clark on. If you watch closely he'll give you some clues, ideas, pointers, on how to be the Superman to your Lois in a real Clark world.

Believe it or not, just about every woman, in this politically correct equal opportunity world, still desires a man who can sweep her off her feet and fly her to the moon.

(P.S. I usually take all the pictures that feature in my Blog but Dean was busy so I used a picture of him from my DVD's. Please don't sue me all you folks who made up and produced the DVDs. I won't do it again.)


© nancy 9.8.2009

HUMPTY DUMPTY

She couldn’t put it off any longer. All Tatti ever knew was the daily raising of her three children, the PTA meetings, Sunday school, laundry, cleaning up after her family, Garden Club, Book Club, dinner parties for her husband’s partners, taking care of her own parents and everything else in between.

Now she found herself without her husband, her children graduated from college and her parents in and out of the Emergency Room . She was no longer in a beautiful 3000 square foot house with a well manicured yard that she landscaped and sweated in to achieve. No. She was existing in a 500 square foot apartment with door slamming neighbors.

People had the nerve to ask her, “How are you doing?”

She decided to have the guts to answer truthfully, “Not so good.”

Tatti found it interesting to see people’s responses to this truth. They normally heard, “Fine” to this enquiry but they did not know how to respond to the negative truth. So Tatti kept telling people the truth and let the responses fall as they may. She was tired of faking fine when she wasn’t fine. Tired of smiling when she didn’t feel like smiling. Tired of putting on a good Southern face to save face. To really fake it she would need plastic surgery to lift the bags under her eyes from the ten billion tears she had cried at night which seeped under her skin to lodge in the morning in two sagging pouches. Maybe, she wondered, if she looked “Fine” she could fake her own self out and begin to actually believe she was “Fine”. Nothing like a little denial to lift one’s spirits.

Fine. The question was, “Would her insurance cover cosmetic procedures?” The bags under her eyes weren’t life-threatening, but maybe if she had a letter from her therapist sent to the insurance company saying she needed it for her emotional and mental uplifting?

No?

Fine.

Tatti looked the word up in the dictionary and realized it had many variations.
#15. healthy; well:
#6. delicate in texture; filmy:
#13. delicate or subtle:
#14. bright or clear:
#22. in nautical terms...as close as possible to the wind:
#1. of superior or best quality: of high or highest grade
#2. choice, excellent, or admirable:
#8. highly skilled or accomplished:

Maybe she was looking at it all wrong. Maybe she was fine but in a different definition sort of way.

Perhaps she was delicate and filmy and as close to the wind as was possible but she wasn’t going to blow away. She could be #6 and #22 and strive to reach #1 even though she was tarnished.
Perhaps all she needed to work on was #26, "to make fine or finer, esp. by pulverizing"or #28 “by filtration”.

If she could pulverize her thoughts and emotions and put them through some sort of filtration system, then would she come out “fine”? Or crushed into so many pieces that she could never be put back together again like Humpty Dumpty? After all, the original drawing for that Mother Goose Rhyme was never a fragile egg sitting on a wall. But if the egg fell off the wall and cracked open leaving the yolk separated from the white, then how could it ever be put back together again?

Tatti wondered if her marriage was like an egg . . . two people of different colors encased in a shell. Only her shell fell off the 'til-death-do-us-part wall and she found herself broken in tiny pieces with her guts split wide open. Could her marriage still exist in a scrambled mess? After all, an egg was an egg whether it was sunny side up, boiled, or scrambled, right?

Yes . . . but it doesn't look the same . . . feel the same.

© nancy 9.1.2009