(25) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Google Street View

I traveled this Google Street View road in Virginia a couple of nights ago at midnight. It’s one of the prettiest I’ve been on.

Blue Ridge Blue Collar Man is edging up on his sixty-first birthday, so we’ve started to talk about places we might like to live after retirement.  We’re just in the dreaming stage right now, but it’s been fun to wander about on some of the maps I ordered through AAA.

We’re starting now because this is a decision that we want to give plenty of thought to.  We’ve moved a lot in the twenty-five years we’ve been married, mostly to find better schools for our children, and we are weary of moving.  We want this to be the last time.  We jokingly refer to The Search for our Final Resting Place, but really, that’s what it is. We can’t seem to give up on the idea that we might finally find a place someday where we’ll fit in.  Like I said, we’re dreamers.

So I’ve been studying my maps and occasionally looking at houses online in the areas we’re interested in.  When I find a house I like, I enter its address on Google Earth and fly like a bird from Outer Space down to see it (I guess you’ll only know what I’m talking about if you use Google Earth—believe me, it’s cool!).  Even though I use (and love) paper maps and always will, I have become completely smitten (some might say obsessed) with Google Earth.   I get a little thrill every time I put in an address, then make the dizzying descent to Earth at lightning speed.  But even more, I love…no, I ADORE…Google Street View.

I’ve only know about it for a year, which is probably a good thing because I already spend more time than I should flying down virtual roads.  When we finally graduated from dial-up internet to the slowest DSL, one of the first things I did was to take a little trip with Google Street View.  I love how you can even tell what time of the year it was then by the wildflowers on the side of the road.  I knew it was August in the one above before I noticed the date on the screen.  Yesterday, I saw that it was early autumn when the Google mappers went through Hillsville, Virginia.  I also saw that Hillsville seems to have a nice library.   The one thing I don’t like about Google Street View is that they don’t often cover the back roads that we love so well, but that’s probably too much to ask.

Someday, of course, we hope to actually check out some of these places in something other than our virtual car.  I mean, you can’t pull over and take a hike or buy a jar of honey on Google Street View, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they offer something like that in the future.  On the other hand, our real car can’t fly over other vehicles in the road like our virtual Google car can.  I’ve always wanted to do that…and now I can.

(24) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Squash Casserole

All hail the Squash Casserole! Behold its cheesy goodness! (That dish was empty about half an hour after I took this photo)

Let us now praise the commonplace, the unpretentious, the lowly.  Let us praise the humble squash casserole.

Even the very name is plain and homely, almost self-deprecating—squash.  No pretense here.  Just plebian plentitude featuring the most ordinary ingredients from your garden, fridge, and cabinet—mostly yummy yellow things.  Squash, of course, lots of it.  And butter—half a stick!  (Real butter, please—not the fake stuff).   Cheddar cheese—don’t be stingy!

We almost live on the stuff this time of year.   We are overrun blessed with summer squash and can’t give it away fast enough.   But we don’t mind.  It is so, so good.

So let us now praise squash casserole.  Let us extol its vegetable virtues to the heavens, exalt its yummy yellowness to great heights. Let us give thanks for the delicious, delectable, delightful squash casserole.

(23) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Kindness

Morning light shines through a morning glory leaf

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

Sometimes someone says something really small, and it just fits right into this empty place in your heart. ~From the television show “My So-Called Life”

As long-time readers of my blog know, I am immensely proud of my children and their accomplishments and have bragged shamelessly on them from time to time.  But there’s something else about them that I’m far prouder of, because I believe that there is no attribute more important.

And that attribute is kindness. I am so proud that they are kind.  I am thankful that they are tender-hearted.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. ~George Washington Carver

Instead of expounding on kindness, I think I’d rather tell you about one of the earliest acts I can remember of kindness shown to me.  I was only about six at the time, but I’ll never forget it. It seems such a small thing, but its effect on me at that time was profound. And then, I’d love it if you’d comment about an act of kindness YOU remember, something that perhaps “fit right into this empty place in your heart.”

When I was six, one of our distant relatives who was a piano teacher offered to give my brother and me piano lessons in exchange for him mowing her yard.  I believe that she was a good person at heart, but she was rather short-tempered.  I think perhaps she wasn’t meant to teach children.  When I didn’t practice enough and made mistakes, she would begin a tirade that started with yelling and ended with her grabbing her cat, dropping him on the keyboard (whereupon he’d do a dissonant dance across the keys then leap with a yowl out of the room).  She’d then yell, “That cat can play better than you!”

I’d usually hold in my tears until I could escape into the yard as I waited for Mama to pick me up.  One day, after the teacher had a particularly awful outburst, I ran into the yard as usual.  It was pouring rain, but I stood out there anyway, sobbing in the cold rain and shivering as it soaked my hair and clothes.

Suddenly I felt a hand touch my shoulder and heard the snap of an umbrella being opened.  I looked up to see Bascombe, my teacher’s husband, who was as gentle as she was caustic.  He never said much, but always seemed such a kind presence.  And now he was standing beside me, still saying nothing, but holding the umbrella over me to keep me dry.  There he stood for a very long time, getting more and more soaked himself, but quietly making sure a little girl was sheltered as she cried her heart out in the rain. He never said a word.  He didn’t have to.

What small acts of kindness have you always remembered?

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. ~Leo Buscaglia

(22) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Black Pepper

This should be both in your kitchen cabinet and in your first aid kit. Seriously.

Our local newspaper used to feature a “Chef of the Week,” with a Q & A feature where they asked the chef random questions like “What do you like to eat late at night when you get home from the restaurant?”  (I always loved it when they said something like “Cheetos” or “Cocoa Puffs.”)

One of the most frequent questions was “What is your favorite spice?” Most of the time, it was something ridiculously exotic, like…I dunno…salt distilled from the sweat of Tibetan yaks or something.  Seriously, some of the spices they named seemed about that outlandish.

That’s why I was so delighted when one of the chefs said, simply, “Black Pepper.”  I was delighted not only because it’s the most commonplace, everyday spice you could possibly name, but because it happens to be my favorite spice, too.

Here at my house we buy black pepper in the gargantuan economy-size containers.  I use it for almost everything I cook except desserts.  And if the recipe calls for a teaspoon, I make it a super-duper heaping one.  I do it not only because it tastes good, but because black pepper has real health benefits.  Studies have shown it to have both antibiotic and antioxidant effects in the human body.  And, hey, it’s cheap.  I can buy a colossal canister from the warehouse club for only a few dollars.

We buy it by the quart  not only for all those reasons, but because we’ll never, ever forget that twice it saved our bacon.  Yes, it really did.  Because the most important thing I can tell you about black pepper is that it stops bleeding.  On two separate occasions in the past few years, Blue Ridge Blue Collar Man and I have had unfortunate encounters with well-sharpened household implements.  In his case, a razor-knife; in mine, an electric hedge trimmer.  If you like you can read about them here:

http://blueridgebluecollargirl.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/a-well-seasoned-man/  and http://blueridgebluecollargirl.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/of-fireworks-fireflies-fingers-and-the-fourth-of-july/

I won’t rehash the harrowing tales here, but I will tell you that both involved COPIOUS amounts of blood.  And in both cases, black pepper stopped the bleeding immediately.  Not only that, it really does have a significant antibiotic effect, as both of our very serious wounds healed with no infection.

I just hope nobody tells the pharmaceutical companies about how amazing it is.  They’ll buy up all the black pepper, put it in a capsule, call it some silly name, and charge us an arm and a leg for it.

(21) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: An Unexpected Phone Call from an Old Friend

Kevin gave me this concrete frog years ago. Mister Frog likes to play his guitar for the birds and gnomes. We’ve been through a lot together—Mister Frog and me. I love him dearly.

I don’t particularly like talking on the phone, but I’ve had to develop a tolerance since that’s the main way we keep in touch with old friends and family.  There’s email, too (which I suppose, being the tongue-tied sort, I prefer) but I do like the immediate response—the give and take—of a phone conversation.  Of course, we do visit each other from time to time, but time and/or money are often short.

My old friend Kevin called last week.  We’ve known each other for 34 years now.  I actually met him fleetingly when I was a teenager and he played a folk concert in our town.  I went up afterwards to tell him that I loved the way he sang the shaped-note hymn, Devotion.  It was a pleasant conversation, but I never dreamed we’d become close friends years later when he came as a North Carolina Artist-in-Residence to our small community near the Pamlico Sound. We had a mutual love of yard ornaments, with a particular penchant for anthropomorphized frogs, so spent many happy hours driving in the countryside there where yard ornaments adorned almost every yard.

It had been a while since we talked, so I was especially glad to hear from him.  We both love corny jokes, and he always manages to make me laugh. This time, he told me about his upcoming retirement from the library (he’s now a librarian), what was blooming at his house, and about the two young sisters who often bring him homemade cookies at the library.

It was lovely, and I hung up feeling happy.  I value all my friends, old and new, but a friendship that has stood the test of time and distance is special. I am grateful for friends, old and new and for happy phone calls from friends that come out of the blue, often just when you need them.

(20) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Birds

Here’s a rather bedraggled and disheveled-looking cardinal holding an unidentified avian food item in his beak. He’s still beautiful, though. I think he’s a young fellow.

In my last post, I used the phrase “songbird sanctuary.”  I meant, of course, that I like to think of the Doublewide Ranch as a refuge for songbirds, where they are loved and appreciated and where I plant shrubs and flowers specifically to provide berries or seeds for their dining pleasure (plenty of juicy bugs, too!)

But when I think about it, it’s a sanctuary for us, as well.  When the ways of the world don’t make sense (and they’re really not making sense these days), I can think of nothing more soothing and peaceful than wandering about, watching my avian friends.   I know I’ve written about it many times, but It’s worth mentioning again since there’s no way I can make a list of Thirty Things I’m Grateful For without acknowledging the joy and tranquility that birds provide. And I think the word “sanctuary” is appropriate in more ways than one.  There’s nowhere I feel more of a sense of the holy than outside watching birds dart and soar in the heavens.

I’m going to miss my fellow bird lover, Benjamin, when he leaves eight days from now.  Not only does he share my pleasure in watching birds, but he can almost always name the bird we’re seeing or hearing.  And since I gave him my camera, he has taken some amazing shots and videos.  Here’s one he made of two pileated woodpeckers in our back yard. (No, that’s not our house you see in the background—wish it were.  And, by the way, the “Mr. B” who composed and played the “Woodpecker March” was none other than Mr. Benjamin himself).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZIdZ6btiLg&feature=context-gfa

I am grateful to the songbirds who make the Doublewide Ranch a sanctuary for us, where our spirits are revived and where we find peace and solace for our weary souls.

(19) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: The Fierce Courage of Animal Parents

A very brave mockingbird

Here at the Doublewide Ranch, we often hear the loud, raucous caws of many crows and look up to see them chasing away a hawk that’s dared to venture into our songbird sanctuary.  Occasionally, a few mockingbirds and even bluejays will join in to chase off the intruder.

We recently heard the sound of crows and mockingbirds in an uproar and looked out to see that a broadwing hawk had landed on the bamboo bean poles in the garden next to the grape arbor.  We were astonished to see two mockingbirds bravely dive-bombing the hawk.  We  took a couple of pictures before it dawned on us that the mockingbird’s fierce courage in facing down the hawk very likely meant that they had some babies nearby, perhaps in the grape arbor.  I could see that the broadwing wasn’t going anywhere and the mockingbirds seemed more and more distressed, so I put down my camera and ran towards the grape arbor with my mightiest and most savage roar.  Benjamin said I sounded like a Viking warrior.

I don’t know if it was my Viking war cry or the crazed look in my eyes, but the hawk lifted off quickly.  The mockingbirds chased him until he was a small dot in the sky.  It was gratifying to feel like I’d played a part in saving the little mockingbird babies…and it felt pretty good to roar like that, too.

I was most impressed, though, by Mom and Dad Mockingbird.  I am grateful for our animal parents and their fierce courage.

A future brave mockingbird

(18) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Our view

We’ve had autumn, spring, and summer rainbows aplenty. I don’t recall any winter ones, though. We can often see the entire rainbow arc.

When we bought the Doublewide Ranch, I asked the folks we bought it from if they’d miss the view.   “Oh no…not at all,” they said. “Sometimes you just get tired of seeing the same old thing every morning.”

I was astonished.  The view is the reason we bought the place (and paid way too much for it).   Our doublewide sits atop a small hill where we can see, not only the skyline of Asheville ten miles away, but much of the surrounding valley, as well as the tall mountain ridges that rise up from the valley in the distance.  Not to mention the vast, endless expanse of sky.  I have to laugh remembering what she said about “seeing the same old thing” because even though we do see the same mountains and the same valley and the same trees, it is never the “same old thing.”   Even now, in just the last five minutes, as thunderclouds moved in from the northwest, the sky has gone from bright blue to blackish-grey and the mountains are partially obscured by what appears to be a rainstorm about ten miles east.  The colors of the hills, the trees, and the grassy valleys are ever-changing with the seasons, and even the skyline of Asheville is transformed as more high rises are constructed.

Sometimes, I’ll lie awake worrying about this and that, occasionally even thinking of how we spent our nest egg on this place shortly before the economy went bust, and now we’ll never get it back. As it is for so many families, our place is now worth much less than we paid for it.  But at first light, as I stand on the porch seeing Blue Ridge Blue Collar Man off to work (as I do every morning), I am amazed anew at the vista of mountains, fields, trees, and sky before me.  I still sometimes can hardly believe that I get to wake up to this every single day.

Sure, in some ways it IS the same thing every day.  But it’s wonderful to depend on those mountains, those hills, and those trees (for the most part) being there every day.   Really, though, it’s never the same because nature’s many-hued palette changes from hour to hour, from day to day, from season to season.  I am grateful for the ways in which our view never changes, and I am grateful for the ways in which it does.  I’ll never, ever take it for granted.  And I’ll never, ever get tired of it.

I watch the sun rise over the mountains almost every morning.

Sometimes, when the mist is thick, the mountains look like islands in the sea of fog. Here, the fog shines with an almost holy glow.

Full moon sky

In winter, after the rain

Asheville from our porch–late afternoon

From our porch…in summer

(17) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: The Chance to Explain

Seems like Andy was always having to explain something to Opie—often because he’d made a mistake and wanted to make things right. He was a good dad.

I  sometimes wonder, when folks who have read my writing meet me for the first time, if they are surprised at how inarticulate I am in talking.  Yes indeed, I definitely write better than I talk.  Sometimes, especially lately, carrying on even the most ordinary conversation is daunting to me.

This lack of lucidity sometimes leads to misunderstandings.  If I’m lucky, the person I’m talking to expresses their confusion or, in the very worst cases of my incoherence, when someone takes offense, they tell me outright what I said that offended them.  I appreciate that because it gives me a chance to make things right. I am always horrified when I discover that I’ve hurt someone’s feelings, however unintentional it was (and it is ALWAYS unintentional).

So I am thankful for a chance to explain myself.  Sometimes, even in writing, I don’t quite get my point across.  Even here on my blog.

So here’s where I want to say that yesterday’s post (about the joys of wordplay) praising my lovely limerick commenter was not meant to exclude my other commenters or to suggest that I valued that comment over the others.  I didn’t (although, of course, I was delighted by the limerick).  Seriously, I am STILL amazed that people take the time out of their busy lives to read what I write and even better, to comment on it.  I truly treasure every single comment I get.  You really have no idea what they mean to me.

So, thank goodness for the chance to explain, for the chance to make things right.   As one of the sometimes tongue-tied ones, I am grateful for second chances.

(16) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Wordplay

This picture has nothing to do with wordplay, really. But it makes me laugh.

Like most bloggers, I love the comments I get on my posts.  Sometimes, I’ve even thought that the comments were better than my post.   Sometimes they move me to tears; sometimes, they make me laugh out loud with delight.

This afternoon, a comment on my previous post made me laugh out loud with delight.  It also inspired the idea for today’s Grateful Praise.

Alert readers may have noticed a wee bit of alliteration in my previous post— a plentiful plethora, a playful plural profusion of “P’s”:

…one of the perils of persistently posting daily is the propensity to ponder the possibility that your readers will tire of hearing about your quotidian life and be coming to your blog only out of a sense of obligation.”

Yes, I love words, and I love playing with words.   I always have.  Back when I used to enter poetry in contests, judges would write things like, “Alliteration in poem is intrusive and distracting!”  That always made me laugh, because I thought a poem should be the very place you could feel free to play with words.

And speaking of wordplay and poetry, I’ve always loved limericks.  No, not the vulgar kind, though I’m sure some of those are very clever.  I like the silly kind.  In fact, one of my favorite limericks ever was the very first one I learned:

A flea and a fly in a flue

Were imprisoned so what could they do?

Said the fly, “Let us flee!”

Said the flea, “Let us fly!”

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

When I learned this around the age of seven, I could not stop saying it.  I thought it the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard.

So imagine my delight when I found in my comments today a limerick that someone wrote just for me!  And not only did they write me my own personal limerick, but they alluded to my alliteration and found it alluring.   An alliteration ally!   Here’s their wonderful and altogether winsome wordplay:

The burden of browsing a blog
Is hardly so much of a slog
When the erudite author
Betakes of the bother
Of a six-word alliterative jog.

 They signed simply as “A poet,” so I’m not sure I’ll ever know who they are.  But whoever you are, I am grateful, my illustrious alliterative ally.  I loved your lovely lighthearted limerick.