Category Archives: rural

Suddenly: Summer!

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howstuffworks.com

howstuffworks.com

Winter and spring were certainly…something. Something weird. Now the corn is as high as a squirrel’s eye—if, by the time this goes to press, he’s standing on his hindquarters, which says something about how fast corn grows—and suddenly: summer! Which reminds me of a Betty Crocker product named Suddenly Salad®, which says something about marketing, the onset of delirium during lengthy marketing meetings, or the neurological effects of pollutants in cities where marketing smoothies dream this stuff up.

Googling “Where was Suddenly Salad invented,” which autofills so I’m not the first to ask, you find a list of consumer grievances about this product. The only person who seems to like it goes by the handle CrzyCatLady. Among my favorites: “This salad is way too salty! Suddenly DEHYDRATED…Thanks for nothing, Betty!” Poor Betty. Was she a real woman? Let’s look!

Of course not, sigh. The facts: A flour milling company that became General Mills invented the sadly fictitious Betty in 1921, when a contest generated so much mail—and baking questions—that the all-male advertising department had to consult the women of Gold Medal Flour. Enter the faked Betty, who “signed” letters and ended up on the radio.

Courtesy of NH Nutter

Courtesy of NH Nutter

Suddenly Salads’ comments section suggests a product named Armour Treet ® (what, it’s not technically a real treat so they can’t legally spell it right?) that you can mix in with Suddenly Salad® if you have completely lost your mind. It’s like SPAM®, apparently, because when you Google Armour Treet, it autofills with “…versus SPAM”  (salt pork and…mystery? NO! Shoulder of pork and ham, according to Mental Floss in a tight online synopsis. God love the Internet.)

Anyway: summer. Bicycling to a swimming hole, I ride into a blizzard of poplar fluff(poplar?) fluff. The air is filled with it. I think it’s snow. Which says something about how short our summers are or how long our winters. Get out there and enjoy it people. Five picnics from now it’ll be over.

This time of year there is fluff in the columns, fluff between our ears. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the livin’ is easy, but it’s definitely less…motivated. To wit, the annual June Hazmat Follies , in which we miss the hazardous material drop-off by one minute (“Sorry, we’re closed.”) and return the bag of toxic waste to the barn for another six months. Every year.

But hey, it’s summer. Songbirds. Six-packs (both kinds). Suddenly Salad®. Certainly Something®. Fishin’. Fireflies. Farmers’ Markets. Tomato sandwiches. River plunges, frolicsome naked moonlit swims. Tenny, golf, DEET, and all the mayo you can slather. A friend’s reaction to my recent column maligning DEET: “I have several times decided that temporary relief from biting insects is worth a lifetime of brain damage.” And this from a father of two. Summer!

Other hazards: we expose ourselves more to wild animals. Something we don’t think about until it’s too late—the crazed rabid skunk is charging skunkyour neighbor who is beating it with a shovel to no effect all, she just keep charging. Then there’s the red fox we’ve seen trotting about; that thing covers a lot of ground. He will gladly relieve you of your small dog or cat. And don’t forget the fisher cats. Those crazy varmints will run onto your porch, grab your pet, and run off. Vigilance!

More happily, summertime convo—like this gem overheard lakeside:

“Malcolm, don’t be rolling around in the sand. We’re leaving!”

“It’s an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency? Put it into words.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“It’s not an emergency. We’re leaving.”

Which says a lot about the lure of sand, perceived crises, and family dynamics once school’s out. Good day, good naked swims, and good summer.

Summer Bumper Sticker

Retired Teacher—Every Child Left Behind

The Sane Need Not Apply

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reb schubMy neighbor Rebecca, a no-nonsense Iron Woman tuffie, once emerged from her apartment with cuts and bruises like she’d lost a round with a threshing machine. No, she said, it was the Death Race. She’d been asleep for two days.

One of Vermont’s crazier offerings, the upcoming Death Race is a twisted, punishing exercise in x-treme sport nutterness. For one thing, particpants are not told until the last minute when it will actually begin. Articles detailing it appear here and here.  Its competitors mystify regular folk; they also entertain. Thank you, nutters.

I say: know when to give up.  Also: barbed wire is not your friend. Good luck!

Total nutter.

Total nutter.

The Devil is in the DEETails

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greenbaywi.gov

Litterbug, per greenbaywi.gov

A normally wry friend recently told me how his ex had pointed out his faults on her way out the door. This had made him especially dejected. I asked, “What faults?” and he explained. “You know, the disorganization, the forgetfulness, the keen desire to have my picture taken with political celebrities. . . .” I replied, “Those aren’t faults. Those are endearing traits, charming to those who love you.”

It’s been said that what attracts you to someone is what later drives you nuts. Likewise, qualities you have that delighted someone can devolve into vile faults demanding extirpation. But it’s a puzzle when someone who is leaving you feels obligated to express exactly why you’re not good enough. Why do that? Isn’t it bad enough they’re abandoning you? I once received a 13-page Dear Jane letter, detailing all I had done wrong. I see, I thought. Yes, it’s clear now. Thanks so much.

What became clear? My shortcomings? No. That the devil is alive and well. He enters people and makes them romance you, leave you, and tell you how you failed. The devil was in the details: in this case elaborately illustrated criticisms. The devil also invented call waiting, data mining, and other vexing details of modern life designed to make us willing to swap with him our souls, for just a few moments of blessed peace.

He also recruits Litterbugs. When I’m behind someone that throws a cigarette or Big Gulp out a car window, I become possessed. I honk, flash my lights, and make impolite gestures. I know this is wrong, and both Litterbug and I could rightfully say (nod to Flip Wilson), “The devil made me do it.”

Discussing this in church, a wry southern friend says with vehemence, “I want to know. What does a litterbug look like?” I know precisely what they look like but the words I’d use to describe one cannot be said in church. We work ourselves into a lather over it. Then, pews away, I hear a Vermonter of many years (90+?) say to her companion, “It always takes me by surprise, spring. It’s such a lovely transformation, especially after a hard winter.” That this woman could still be awed by how our area is like a different planet in spring, after nearly 100 of them, drives the devil right out of me.

mud from N

Gone fishin’.

I give a wry friend a candy bar named Chocolate Interlude which she promptly renames Chocolate Intervention. Then I think how in these blasted modern tymes how they add an “e” to things (e-billing, e-commerce) and how we can add our own e’s for the heck of it, to our e-underwear and our e-moxy and our e-breath. And how a wry Vermont friend said in Connecticut, “They call these pot holes?” And how nude season is nigh, and the mighty Goliath of mud has been subjugated by gravity and slender blades of grass, and nothing but nothing smells like flowering trees.

sugarandspicedkitchen.com

sugarandspicedkitchen.com

Then I attend, despite this column’s deadline, the local Legislative Breakfast. Our state senators and representatives articulatewith intelligence and fairness issues that are ridiculously complex, e.g., the GMO labeling bill just passed—and how VT will be sued by corporations. That the Governor’s so-called “Food Fight Fund” is being established, smartly, with the help of non-Vermonters, is cheering. Someone half my age pays me a compliment. I spot a granny on a riding mower. Finally—get this—technology proves heartening. I choose truelove as a password and it is denied for being “too common.” That its selection as a password is too common says something huge about humankind.

Yes, there is plenty of hard evidence of the devil’s existence, including but not limited to black flies, BP, and the Disgraceful Home Printer Ink Scandal of Modern Tymes, wherein (pricey!) ink tanks mysteriously dry up and your (infernal!) printer won’t even scan without ink. Sometimes we choose between two devils, say, black flies and DEET. A Mainer I know says you can’t go fishing without it. I use it when the biters are so vicious I don’t care if it shuts down my brain, bladder, and kidneys, though I know DEET to be compressed devil in a can.

Some days, the devil’s around every corner, seems like. Yet somehow, with an overheard “lovely transformation” and a too-common password and grannies riding mowers and a posse of wry friends, we remain eHopeful. We soldier on. If you feel disheartened, I’ll give you part of my heart, that as yet unaffected as yet by DEET and other devilment. Good luck. Good day.

You Never Know What You’ll Find

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green up loot…on Green Up Day, when Vermonters comb the Land for garbage and citizens with trucks (not uncommon in Vermont) haul it off to the dump. Literally tons of garbage statewide.

I found the usual assortment of party implements plus mystery stuff. Like Spider Man underwear (size: extra extra small; they make underwear this little?) and a shoe so badly destroyed you had to wonder what happened to it (threshing machine? Two bears fought over it?) Also a sign thgreen up shoeat said WATCH IT GROW (watch what grow, the cubic volume of garbage? A Bud Light tree?) The kindly lady I worked with had somehow hauled a mattress into her truck, after days of rain. New Englanders are tough, man.

As I passed other Green Uppers later in my car, I gave them the same double-honk and thumbs-up out the window we’d gotten earlier.  Good work, keepers of the Land!

See the refuse of Green Up Days 2013 and 2012.

Total Eclipse of the Mud

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The universeDyed by hand! deals people some pretty bad hands. Whether it’s a physical affliction making life a living hell, or a heart so broken you can’t inhale, it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s happening to you or someone you love. When you love someone, their pain becomes yours. As anyone who’s watched their beloved person die will tell you, at some point they wished they could trade places with their suffering person. Even though watching it unfold—and enduring its aftermath in a daze—likely hurt worse.

Now that’s a dire way to start a column, especially one you’ve come to rely upon instead for laffs, seemingly unrelated topics woven together, questionable spellings, and general disregard for propriety. You shall have that, dear Reader. But if Holy Week and Passover aren’t about death and mayhem and baffled onlookers, I don’t know what is, so try to run with this. I  write on seasonal subjects and, well, here we are.

When it comes to religion, I pretty much believe all of it. Meoe treeeaning I think that people at the time believed these things were happening, and whether they did or did not occur is not important to me. What matters to me is that humans today get together to honor those that were beacons of kindness a really long time ago, to give thanks to something bigger than we, to whisper wishes for those in need, and that there’s a place you can go where you can leave your purse unattended and probably no one will go through it. Our religious affiliation is typically decided by our parents; that a single religion is The Right One is to me as perverse as the notion that Christians were born sinners whose sometimes unbaptized children languish in Hell or Limbo eternally. I don’t believe there is a Hell outside of Earth proper. We have plenty of Hell right here at home.

Whether Jesus was a son of God who performed miracles and rose from the dead is, in my opinion, anyone’s guess. But I moosebelieve he was a real and good man and that, as with other religious figures, some things he said and did were accurately recorded. There could well be a God, as anyone who’s seen a live moose up close, smelled a lemon blossom, or shot a  hole-in-one will agree. I had to “block” an unruly scarf this week, and while the travel iron my boyfriend bought me in 1987 is adorable, it doesn’t have steam. I borrowed my neighbor’s. While blocking, I thought, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind owning a steam iron.” An hour later at the dump I found on the FREE table a steam iron for the taking. Coincidence? Proof of God?

Pink Pink Pink Pink Pink Pink Pink Pink MoonOr Gods! The pagans will surely have rocked Tuesday’s full moon by this column’s printing, what with the Blood Moon total eclipse. Having missed March’s Worm Moon (?) entirely, I’m paying closer attention. CNN Tech claims the moon will be red-orange like a “desert sunset”; one NASAn preferred “reddish, ugly-looking.” I’ll settle for dishwater gray, as we have been let down repeatedly by scientists promising a spectacular celestial event that turns out either a dud or obscured by clouds. Although, as with religious followers (which they kind of are), I do believe scientists think it to be true when they say it.

America, you’ve got another chance. On October 8, then April 4 and September 28 of 2015, there are three more Blood Moons visible from the entire US. Four in a row, according to effusive CNN, is “like drawing a rare lunar poker hand.” Which I didn’t read until an hour after starting this column’s first sentence. Coincidence? You decide.

MudOne thing is certain: mud is upon us (lit. and fig.). As its mellifluous downhill oozings and the soft, sweet hum of cluster flies lull us to sleep at night, may we dream of ways to slog through mud and life with grace. God shows [its] face from time to time, seems like. If in fact real, God apparently lets us do whatever we want. Which a lot of the time is no good at all. So it’s up to us manage our relationships, communities, and planet with brains and respect. If there is a God, I do hope we haven’t been too much of a disappointment because I, for one, am trying my damnedest. And I see you out there, too, people. I see your deli slicer-sharp minds, strong hands, and big hearts at work. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. Good day.

Up Next Month Evidence of the Devil: Black flies, BP, and the Disgraceful Home Printer Ink Scandal of Modern Tymes

There’s Just Something About a Spool

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From slender filaments to giant cables, spools get the job done right. The big daddy on the left appeared down the road a piece. It made my day.

My sister-in-law, an extremely talented fiber artist, has dozens of spools. I An Artist's Spools are best.have a lowly 30. If you’ve never wound a bobbin on a sewing machine before, you’re missing out. If mankind wound more bobbins, there’d be less misery and lower crime rates.

This place, El Taller (“The Studio”), in Lawrence, MA is a cool coffee shop with books and…spools. They write in your coffee. What’s better than that?

Bienvenudo, baby.

Spools stools

Go here!

“Enough with the Beauty Already”

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20 below knom.orgThis gem was uttered by a friend in disgust after the 27th day of subzero temperatures caused by the pernicious Polar Vortex. Ours was a Jack London winter, visually stunning and physically painful, something we’d rather read about than live.  But New Englanders proved their mettle once again, the nasty temps and strong winds of the deep freeze pooh-pooh’d  by skiers, ice fishermen, snow sculptors, and the various groups of demented nutters that dunk themselves in Lake Champlain, this year amidst large chunks of ice. Others enjoyed their ice indoors, watching Olympic skating men of many nations on TV tossing bespangled partners sky high and—mercifully—catching them, in their giant meat paws.

Upsy-daisie!

You can get cabin fever even in a mansion.

Today’s post falls on the first day of spring. Which every year is either joyful or a cruel joke, dependent upon the weather. March came in like a lion this year and will leave, with any luck, like a mewling little kitten. With modern global weirding we just don’t know. Really, we never did and, besides, April is not supposed to be a balmy month in northern New England; if it is we are probably saying Welcome! to invasive species like maple-killing insects and Hey there to greenhouse gases. But every gardener is chomping at the bit and who can blame them? As one cabin fever casualty put it a month ago, “The walls seem a little…closer…this year.”

Ice beauty of a different kind.

While the beauty was remarkable—frozen solid rivers, sparkling snow, monster icicles—northerners were cracking up and southerners suffered as well. Which you might think would please us northies but didn’t, if only because of the promise of heightened orange juice prices and fossil fumage. Once again we were jealous of—get this—New Jersey, which got way more snow early on than we did. Here, we had unimpressive snowfall until the recent blast, but what snow landed remained with endless subzero temps and endlesser talking about subzero temps.

Now the birds are chattering. They know this godforsaken winter will soon end, and by more than a calendar designation.  We have plenty of snow, with ideal temps for outdoorsiness. April has never been more anticipated. She may, of course, present fresh snow storms and protracted sugaring, an anathema to certain wives whose menfolk in their sugar shacks try to match sap boiling with beer consumption at a gallon-per-gallon pace deep into spring. Regardless, we all hope for a superb sugar season and await April’s many treasures, including National Walk to Work Day when hundreds in the Upper Valley are seen marching 30 to 40 miles on I-89 or -91. Lucky for the Upper Valley it is not called Walk To and From Work Day.

A host of April holidays follows, with Palm Sunday, Passover, Tax Day, Good Friday, Easter, Patriot’s Day, Earth Day, Secretaries’ Day (if you are from another era, which I am), Take Your Daughter To Work Day (O, treasured episode of The Office), and finally Arbor Day, to prepare us for the greatest of all the spring holidays, Green Up Vermont Day, a.k.a. Rubber Glovin’ It Day if you pick up the HazMatty biohazards I always manage to harvest on this special day in my randomly assigned location. Try it, you’ll like it! Sign up, clean up, and green up. Great good fun.

Wow, thinking of greenery just rockets our brains into thoughts of (dare I say it?) summer.  Among the collateral damage of a winter like this one: tubeside vegetation. Being held prisoner by the climate meant far more sitting around inside doing Vermonty crafts, reading and, yes, watching TV. It has taken me over a decade in the Green

Some nudity is unintentional.

Mountain State to learn that there is a heck of a lot of nudity going on here. The state is like one big nudist’s colony. People swimming, making bird houses, lounging about, doing the dishes, gardening…naked. All over the place.   Where am I going with this? Right here: tubeside vegetation is very, very, very bad for nudity. We are going to have to work extra hard this year to shed those unaesthetic pounds if we want to be polite nudists, people. Tough it out.

Is today’s vernal equinox truly what determines the first day of spring? Let’s ask modern-day oracle, Google, shall we? Hmm, s/he delivers us to the Farmers’ Almanac where we can read their take—and the fighty, oddly spelled comments below it—online. Read up and take a stance. And take heart! Spring’s a comin’. Good arguing, good nuding prep, and good (snowy) spring day.

Erin Go Braless

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This holiday reminds me of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, a terrifying movie to show to children, which is exactly what the Rome Theater did in about 1972. I don’t know which was scarier, the Grim Reaper’s death wagon or a young Sean Connery singing.

lilithvampiriozah.deviantart.com

Wikipedia describes St. Patrick’s day as “a cultural and religious holiday.” Not sure if anyone’s waxing religious about it. Here in Vermont we’re waxing our skis while elsewhere the shillelaghs are shurely being shellacked. This day’s commonly excessive boozing is foul, but with Irish heritage a whiskey or beer is in order if you can handle it. It’s much easier to see leprechauns after a green beezer or two. The key is not to have too many or you see a banshee instead. It seems modern banshees are on the busty side, and wicked braless.

How they filmed Darby’s little people is described here. You could probably do it at home. If you have giant furniture and a young Sean Connery in your barn.

Bring Awn the Brawn

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brawny manMaybe it’s the Olympics, but brawn has been on our brains.

The Brawny Man commercials delighted women some years back.  You can see why. Part Northern Exposure, part Alan Alda, and part bodice ripper, the flannel-wearing, hilariously empathetic—yet manful—Brawny Man embodies a delicious casserole of male traits that doesn’t exist in real life. The writers worked a paper towel into every episode. The series was called “Innocent Escapes.”  A rural tonic for modern tymes.

Out With The Old, In With The New…Program

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grey on grey

One shade of grey.

January’s column historically presents (hilarious!) fake predictions for the new year, contributed by the wingnuts I call friends. Not this year, due to lack of participation (read: interest) last year. Well!

We will, however, do our annual Suggested Reading column. Please submit nominees with 10 words on why; books don’t have to be prizeworthy, just something-worthy.  These may appear in the Sooperbowl issue under “Other Interests.” This year the Sooperbowl falls on Groundhog’s Day. If the groundhog emerges and sees the shadow of a wardrobe malfunction, it’s, er, halftime?

When I’m not busy being chased by snow devils, finding grocery items marked reduced to clear, or serving as a cautionary tale, I’m gathering information on the meaninglessfulness of life to share with you, dear Reader. Let’s proceed in an orderly fashion. Reduced chaos is part of the UVG 2014 New Program for All.

Snow Devils: Did you know that when you see a snow devil, you can make a wish? Same goes for sightings of blimps, salamanders, exploding light bulbs, and DHART. My lunatics invented these rules, and of course with DHART the wish is for the occupant of that medical emergency helicopter. You can make up rules, too—we need all the luck we can get. I saw a snow devil while snowshoeing and didn’t even make the wish until days later while sledding in my car on glare ice; my wish was to survive. Wish granted. See? It works! The next wish will be that it doesn’t go tens below zero again. Your car’s otherworldly sound upon starting and the radio dial’s groaning reluctance make a girl…nervous. Brutal cold does not grease the wheels of the 2014 New Program (lit. or fig.).

Reduced To Clear:  Store items discounted with these three precious words should include not only expired vitamins, discontinued products, and foodstuffs past their prime, but also those with asinine labeling like Snack Pack’s “As much CALCIUM as an 8 0z. glass of MILK” (emphasis theirs). Adults who can read don’t consider Snack Pack® a source of anything more than tasty goo; if we want to ingest or give kids calcium we’ll grab a stick of Cabot, for God’s sake. And three words for purveyors promising a Vitamin D Blowout!!! (exclamation points theirs):  count me in. With overcast wintry skies fostering deep mid-winter psychoses, northerners need all the D we can guzzle. Vigilance is part of the New Program. Vigilance!

On Serving as a Cautionary Tale:  This would be me discussing football (“So the linebacker, he receives the ball?”), slashing my enfant terrible way through moronic Facebook posts or comments, and in some of my, uh, “career” “choices.” It’s a prickly job, the archetypal role of cautionary tale, but someone’s got to do it. Besides, being the object of scorn and ridicule has its advantages. One, expectations of you are exceedingly low; if you say or do anything remotely smart, people get excited—even laudatory. Also, as a believer in the beautiful soup of our combined creatural energy, I feel we either add to or detract from this stew via our moods and actions. Your minusculest chuckle, dear Reader, elevates our collective vibration! Feeling good and making others do so is important. But as much as I strive to make people feel good or even hoot, I can only intentionally elicit so much.  If they are laughing at me behind me back, discharging a solid guttural blast at my expense, well that’s a freebie. The collective soup wins. Earth needs all the laffs she can get. Laugh at my expense, babies. Laugh it up.

The Meaninglessfulness of Life:  By this I mean that as meaningless as our lives often seem, they are full in that we have impact that half the time we don’t even know about (nod to It’s A Wonderful Life, which we forget promptly upon viewing). I’ll leave this one to Christopher Hitchens, the deceased, British-born, non-partisan equal opportunity offender, writer, philosopher, intellect, lush, and fearlessly funny professional soap boxer:

“A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so.”  – Hitch-22: A Memoir

snow on ice

Snow on ice on water on…more ice?

Cosmic joke or no, grab all you can get, people. Get all you can need. Give it back tenfold via your laffs without even trying. Make up luck rules that square with your own New Program for 2014. See what happens. And by all means, report in. Good day.

Ann can be reached at uppervalleygirl@gmail.com or ann.aikens.7 on Facebook. Follow her on Twitter at @uvgvt or on the nuclear green thing on the upper right at www.uppervalleygirl.wordpress.com.