It's Mater Sammich Time!

"It's a smile, it's a kiss, it's a sip of wine...it's summertime!" - Kenny Chesney   

I just ate the first hand-picked tomato/cucumber sandwich of the season and hung a new hammock in the backyard. Summer has officially begun. The bright taste and rich deliciousness biting into a piece of fresh garden produce brings makes memories of summer pleasures past come flooding back and for me, most of those memories are tied to scents.

The childhood summers smelled of chlorine and sun and bright blue swimming pools. Those were the days before sun screen, so we slathered ourselves with suntan oil that smelled of coconut and spent hours in the sun, going from pool to beach towel and back again. I remember the feel of the warm concrete under my wet beach towel and the hot sun on my face. When I was a child, I was blonde, so by the end of summer my hair had turned green from the swimming pool chlorine, but I didn't care. Back then, all of us blonde kids had green hair in the summertime.

The summer I was seven I learned how to flop off the high dive. I never mastered diving, but I had a pretty good flop and a decent cannon ball. I still remember the fear and exhilaration of looking down at the water, so far below, wondering if I had the courage to jump, taking that final deep breath, then slamming into the water, tapping the bottom of the deep end with the tips of my toes, water in my nose, bubbles surrounding me, then float, float, float to the top and do it all again.

There was a faint cherry, berry, intensely sweet smell of popsicles in the swimming pool air. My favorite were those red, white and blue bullets. They still sell them and I bought one a while back. It didn't taste anything like I remembered, but then summers were larger than life back then.  

One of my grandmothers planted petunias all around her house, every summer - red petunias, purple petunias, pink petunias, white petunias, all kinds of petunias. By mid-day, when the sun was really hot and high overhead, the perfume from those petunias filled her yard. To this day, a hint of hot petunia on the wind sends me back to my Gramma's porch swing, where I lie happily smelling the breeze with my head on her lap. I've planted petunias many times, but mine never smell as good as hers did.

When I was a young mother, my favorite summer smell was the scent of my children's sweaty heads, hair all curly and wet, a bit of dirt, somehow, always mixed in. I loved sitting with my kids, holding them close, pressing my cheeks against those precious little heads...Such a sweet, earthy, poignant aroma, like hope and potential and innocence, all wrapped into one whiff.     

The parenting year summers were full of campfires and roasted marshmallows. There was the scent of the summer rain and the sea and the shore. The gentle hum of the ceiling fans, the whir of the hard-working air conditioner, cicadas buzzing, tree frogs chirping and the low happy sound of voices, talking and laughing outside provided the soundtrack for those days.  

These days summer smells like the warm spicy odor my tomato plants give off, as I walk between their tightly sown rows. Honeysuckle, jasmine and gardenia, a hint of rose, the clean coolness that mist from the garden hose brings as it blows across the breeze. I have a lovely, deep-toned wind chime; from here on out, hearing it will bring these summers back to me. And, there are birds, so many birds of all kinds, flocking to the feeders and bird baths I provide. Sometimes their cheerful chirping, chattering and song is so loud, I have to just stop and marvel at it. So much life, so much joy...it's the sound of summertime.

There have been wonderful summers and ones not so great. There have been fantastic vacation trips and summers where it felt like all I did was yard work. If money were no object, I'd put a swimming pool in, just to experience the smell of chlorine and turn a few of my hairs green again. If time could be turned back, I would sit on my grandmother's lap and smell her petunias again. If memories could be relived, I would spend an afternoon holding my sweaty-headed kids, breathing the scent of their youth again.  

Whatever summer is for you, I wish you the best of it. Enjoy these next few hot, lazy months - the tastes, the scents, the sounds and the memories they evoke. I hope you get a chance to create some new memories with adventures you take and things that you do. We have a fine, full summer planned and our garden is huge and verdant, so there will be no shortage of memories made or tomato/cucumber sandwiches eaten this year.

Which Muppet are you?

 

 

 

"Life's like a movie, write your own ending." - Kermit the Frog

The Muppets are back and this time it's not in a television show or a movie. It's in a personality theory. Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate magazine and contributing editor for Newsweek, has come up with something she calls Unified Muppet Theory and for those of us who love the Muppets (and/or who love personality theories) it's pretty interesting stuff.

She poses that each of us can be classified as either an Order Muppet or a Chaos Muppet, and once we figure out which we are, "it all sorts itself out from there."

Order Muppets are highly regimented, hyper-organized, adverse to surprises and tend to be a bit neurotic. Examples would be Bert, Kermit the Frog and Beaker. At times Order Muppets resent the weight of the world on their shoulders, (think Kermit's "It ain't easy being green...") but they also know they keep the show going and in that they take not so secret pride.    

Chaos Muppets are brilliant, emotional, volatile and often out of control. They are the life of the party, examples being Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo and Professor Honeydew.

As with all things, in Muppet Theory, balance is the key. Harmony, whether it be in a relationship, a marriage, a family or the workplace comes when there is a blend of Chaos and Order Muppets. Too much order? Things get rigid and stuffy; creativity is lacking, humor, too...Chaos rules? Good luck getting anything done because that's just one hot (even if hilarious) mess.     

For the most part, I'd identify myself as an Order Muppet, all into control, routine, habit, with more than my fair share of neuroses, and no surprises, please! If good marriages are made when opposites attract, that would make Mr. Clark a Chaos Muppet. And, while he is not emotional or volatile, he is often unorganized. He is more brilliant than me. He is always open to an unforeseen adventure or a surprise change in pace. He has also been known to be the life of more than one party.   

Since marriage goes on forever (or so it seems...) there is plenty of time for surprises and twists and turns in the road. After years of keeping order and routine in our home (at least, that's what I thought I did...) I have become the Chaos Muppet who seems to have the attention span of a gnat and can't seem to get anything done, while Mr. Clark has become the Order Muppet who keeps us both on track.

He's taken to determining what we do on weekends, in terms of balancing chores with pleasure. He keeps our ongoing "get the house in order" campaign on track and does the same with the garden and yard. Things I find to be insurmountable (like cleaning never before cleaned closets) he tackles cheerfully and actually gets the job done. All I have to do is take out the bags of trash, deliver a few things to Goodwill and sweep up after him. In classic Chaos Muppet style, I melt down emotionally a few times and yell a bit, while Mr. Clark just keeps whistling, clearing and cleaning. It's a blend of Chaos and Order that would make even the Muppets proud.

I can only hope on down the road we'll swap roles and mix things up again, just to keep things interesting. In the meantime, I'll keep channeling Cookie Monster (with a touch of Miss Piggy thrown in), while Mr. Clark acts like a combination of The Swedish Chef and The Count...Wait a minute! We didn't figure out which type of Muppet Miss Piggy, The Swedish Chef or The Count is.

Maybe Muppets, like people, defy stereotypes or maybe Muppet Theory is more complex than it initially seemed. Is it possible to be Faux Chaos - all crazy, creative on the outside, but hard, rigid and inflexible inside? What about Almost Order, which would be organized and together on the outside, yet also a little nuts? Obviously, there's a lot more work to do on this Unified Muppet Theory...In the meantime, so far, what kind of Muppet are you?

 

learning to ride the rain...

"Worry is a misuse of imagination." - Dan Zadra

Gaining wisdom from a mosquito on a rainy day? That sounds like a stretch, yet it happened to me today. I like listening to NPR and on this rainy morning I heard a piece about how mosquitoes deal with raindrops, which to them are like three ton comets pummeling them from the sky. Needless to say, there's no mosquito umbrella big enough or strong enough to protect them from that, so how do they survive a storm?   

Well, according to a team of mechanical engineers at Georgia Tech, mosquitoes don't dodge raindrops, they ride them. The researchers found this out by firing jets of water at mosquitoes while filming them with super-high-speed video cameras. What happens is the mosquito rides the raindrop until the wind catches its wings, which act like tiny kites and pull the mosquito off the raindrop and back into the wind; then away he or she flies. Apparently, they do this over and over again until the storm ends, with each raindrop ride lasting about 1,000th of a second.

One of the researchers, a man named David Hu, described it as "rather than resisting the raindrop, they basically join together." How Zen is that, especially for a mosquito? I don't know that much about being Zen, but I do know resistance is never part of it.  

This riding the rain business is not without risk, however. If the raindrop is close to the ground when the mosquito hops on and the wind doesn't catch its wings before the raindrop hits the ground, kersplat! Dead mosquito. Of course, the mosquito doesn't know about this risk, so rainstorms must present a series of thrilling rides for those nasty little pests. After all, unlike people, bugs don't worry, right?

This notion of riding the rain rather than resisting it appeals to me and got me thinking about my approach to life's rainstorms, both literal and figurative. I am a worrier whose glass is always half empty. If I were a mosquito, I'd be the only one in the whole swarm buzzing loudly and frantically about how the sky is falling and we're all going to end up smashed on the ground. And, in the process, I'd miss out on all of that lovely rain riding...not much of a life approach for a mosquito or a person, really, when you think about it.  

Since I've always lived life on the gloomy side, I don't give changing my approach much thought. Sure, I admire happy-go-lucky types and people who dance in the rain, but I can't imagine being one. Not until recently, when I started thinking it may be time to change my view.

Maybe it's age - it takes a lot of energy to worry all the time; or maybe it's the beginning of wisdom (another symptom of age.)  Anyway, lately I've grown tired of always looking on the dark side and have been consciously trying to focus, instead, on the light. It turns out, this is easier to do than I imagined it would be.

This notion of positive focus is not new. From Phillipians 4:8 ("Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely or of good report; if there be any virtue, any praise, think on these things") to Oprah and Dr. Phil, the power of positive thinking is a known phenomenon. For some reason, it's just taken me my whole life to try it.

I find that if I empty my mind of the chatter and brain brick-a-brack, breathe, focus, listen and feel, the good stuff just starts flooding in. And, I experience things I never thought I'd spend much time feeling, like calm, contentment, peace, happiness and optimism. (Doing something mindless and repetitive like weeding, vacuuming, jogging or mowing helps, as it seems to keep my brain from going back to tensed-up mode...) This all is a welcome change and so far, I'm impressed with my progress.

Like all changes, this positive attitude thing involves one or two steps forward, then a step or two back, but in general, it's getting easier to focus on the bright side and worry less; and, it turns out, I don't miss worrying at all.

The Story People are some of my favorite philosophers and their take on this is, "I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts but they need constant attention & one day I decided I had better things to do." Like those mosquitoes, I may learn to ride raindrops and/or dance in rain yet...

This column appeared in the 6/6/12 edition of the Barrow Journal.