Explaining the Birds & the Bees, But Mostly the Bugs

Posted in authors, Books, Humor, Nature by Shelley Sackier

But before we begin …

A thousand squealing thank yous to Robin Gott — sorcerer of stage, screen, and scribbles — who has so kindly taken a few minutes off from work to sit in his dressing room and whip out a handful of his amazing cartoons to accompany this post. And for so much more of Robin, visit robingott.com

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I think we can all agree that we will never, ever truly be alone.

And for some that is a giant sigh of relief, as being alone is akin to losing your entire family and all your friends—even if they only existed on screen in the form of the cast of Downton Abbey.

But for others, no matter how hard we may try, we discover that we will shuffle on this mortal coil in the company of countless others who clearly have never been invited along.

They make quick assessment of who you are, but mostly where you live, and decide to take up residence—contributing nothing to the upkeep and maintenance, and only adding to your woes.

Bugs.

As I’m pottering about my new abode, discovering nooks and cramming things in crannies, I also discover a great variety of crammed in arthropods—either walking, flying, or in some cases, swimming, depending upon the nook or cranny.

It has been a cycle of either open up cupboard, glance toward ceiling, or focus in on floor followed by squeal, squeak, or shriek.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think bugs are interesting. Fascinating, even. Because who doesn’t want to know how a frustrated Australian seaweed fly finally gets some action from all the disinterested Sheilas around him?

Or how a green spoon worm, happily sitting at the bottom of the sea, can accidentally inhale her husband when she simply suffered from an itch on her nose?

Well, I certainly did.

I’ve read Olivia Judson’s Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. I took copious notes about virgin births and about paralyzing would-be lovers so that your children can eat him alive. I scoured the sketches of detachable penises, and made sure I understood how one could go deaf from too much mite sex.

But seeing it in real life form, knowing that all that was happening right beneath or above my nose was something else altogether.

Hello, Pest Control.

The jolly folks on the other end of the line proved almost too happy to hear from me.

Infestation? Blight? Chiggery scourge and epidemic? How delightful! We’ll be right over.

Mere moments later, I greeted a six foot three, thin as a pine sapling fellow with a beaming face exuding pure celestial rapture, and instead of shaking my hand, he held up a framed 8 x 10 diploma.

Blessings on you and yours, ma’am. My name is Jebediah, and I just got my certs.

Well, uh … I stumbled, glancing up into the scalding hot sun where his head was haloed, Praise … be?

He beamed sunshine. Yes, ma’am. And then stood, turning to admire his freshly-inked degree.

It’s not been 24 hours yet since the family gatherin’ with coffee and a slice of pie to celebrate my good fortune, but I assure you—

He peered down at me gravely.

—I am fully in charge of my faculties despite sneakin’ that sip of Mama’s cookin’ sherry she hides behind the flour tin in the pantry. Ooowee!

He made to swipe at his brow, and I realized the pest company had sent over a reincarnation of Mayberry’s Gomer Pyle.

I suddenly wondered if this meet and greet should come to a quick end, as a few steps farther into the house he would be received by my own set of not-quite-choir-boy-bottles. Well over one hundred of all the Bens and Glens from Scotland, neatly lining an entire wall of shelving.

Come on in, Jebediah, I said hesitantly. Let’s see if we can’t cleanse this little dwelling of its demons.

Six steps into the house he did a three-sixty spin, his wide-eyed, slack jawed visage finding my uneasy one.

Ma’am? I saw all the wood from the outside as I was drivin’ up, but I had no idea there’d be all this wood on the inside too.

I looked at him, my head cocked with incredulity. I live in a log cabin, Jebediah.

He nodded soberly and whispered, This was not on the paperwork.

Might want to make a note of it for next time then, I suppose, but I’ll leave you to it for now. I’ll be in my little office if you need me. I pointed down the hallway.

For the next ninety minutes I heard precious little and finally decided to hunt down the biblical bug butcher.

Jebediah? I called out, and then spotted him crouched on the floor in a corner, his hand cradling an iridescent blue-winged dead wasp.

He glanced up at me, his eyebrows crinkling as he sighed. Real butes these guys are, ain’t they? This here is Chalybion californicum—what you all commonly call the Blue Mud Dauber.

Then he held out his other hand with another bug that looked exactly like the first—including the whole dead part. This here should not be confused with his cousin, the Chlorion aerarium—the Steel-Blue Cricket Hunter—as although the same size, one has a longer pedicel, and the other is much more hairy.

Also, he went on, these fellers are worthy specimens, as some of them will rid the environment of crickets and others of the vicious black widow.

I studied the young man for a full thirty seconds as he sighed long and sorrowfully once again, his head bent low over the bugs he was in charge of destroying.

Jebediah? Are you sure this is the right job for you?

He looked up at me and then swept an arm in a circle over his head. You live in a tree, ma’am.

I sniffed. Well … a dead one, really.

He nodded. Exactly. It’s the natural habitat for nearly all of these creatures. It seems … he paused, … it seems a little unnerving that there has been so much death here today. I did not expect such a high body count on my first day of work.

I walked to my bookshelf and then returned to Jebediah on the floor, holding out Dr. Tatiana’s sexpert advice for all bugs.

Here. Read this. Chances are you’ve been far too immersed in the end of the life cycle for all your many legged friends.

Jebediah read the title slowly and out loud, and then looked up at me dumbstruck. A slow smile crossed his face as he tucked the small book into his back pocket and headed for the door.

Word of warning, Jebediah, I added, you might want to keep this behind the flour tin in the pantry too.

~Shelley

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Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all gossiped about down in the pub. Or check out last month’s post and catch up.

10Mar2013

Daylight savings, nighttime losses …

Posted in Calendar, Farming, Humor, Math, Nature by Shelley Sackier

Sleeping Baby (Photo credit: Lisa Rosario Photography)

Sleep is important.

Personally, it’s more important to me than most anything I can think of. I would gladly give up my favorite meal, a thick wad of cash or even the spare fifty IQ points I tell people that I have if it means I could rid myself of the wretched sluggishness that comes after I’ve overdrawn on my sleep bank account.

In fact, I’d happily give my left lung to simply have back the one hour stolen from me every year in March.

I hate Daylight Savings Time.

Ohio Clock in the U.S. Capitol being turned forward for the country’s first daylight saving time in 1918 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Except when it works in my favor.

The present moment does not fall into that category.

We are a society so tightly wound, so minutely organized, that we refuse to acknowledge our animalism. Our train tables, our baseball games and our prime time television shows fight for an adaptable clock, while our bodily clocks question the strategy.

My bodily clock does not just ask, “Are you sure about this?”—it rebels.

For six months until it gets its way.

My body wants a solar clock. Rise when the sun smacks you in the eye, and start shutting things down right after dinner, dishes and a Downton Abbey.

I am so attuned to the tiny shifts in the astronomical hours that it no longer surprises me to crack open an eyelid ten seconds before a tiny pinprick of pink light nudges above the horizon, announcing an aurora worthy of watching. Of course, the precursor to that event might have something to do with the fact that fifteen seconds prior to sunrise, a weight of around eight pounds, evenly distributed across four tiny paws and wrapped in fur, has perched on my chest and willed my eyes to open, which they remarkably do. It’s uncanny. Or uncatty.

Still, miraculous, right?

Retailers generally favor DST. United Cigar Stores hailed a 1918 DST bill. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And to be wholly pedantic with semantics, the official phrase is Daylight Saving Time, not Savings. And to be wholly persnickety with the phrase, there is no saving. It’s shifting, adjusting or simply sliding the assignment of a named hour to a slot that we like better than where it resided previously.

We’re control freaks.

We’re like tiny gods waving sticks up at the air and shouting, “Take that!”

And if Mother Nature happens to catch a glimpse of us, she’s probably shaking her head and she might even throw out one of our people’s best vernacular comebacks: Whatever.

Yeah, that about sums up our collective human maturity when it comes to thinking we’ve got it all under control. We’re teenagers.

I understand the rationale behind the thinking, to make better use of daylight, but it seems absurd that we’re attempting to make the Earth bend to our will—our preferred and ‘set in stone’ tablets of behavior and time.

Thou shalt not golf in the dark.

I believe this absurdity (failure to coerce the Earth, not golf blindly) to be true only from past blundered experiments where my scientist daughter has repeatedly attempted to explain to me that no matter how hard I wish it to be so, no amount of positive thinking will change the laws of physics and discoveries of science. Mathematical equations will remain true to form no matter how many times you may cheer on the concept that 2 + 2 = 5. A four is a four is a four. Period.

Except when it isn’t.

Example? Some infinities are bigger than others. Thank you, 19th century mathematician Georg Cantor. Trying to wrap your head around that concept is likely to trigger a small brain hemorrhage. And since I covet every cell remaining in that gray amorphous matter residing between my ears, I can’t risk the possibility of injury. But if you’ve got extra, click here or here for more on Georg and his brain dissolving theory. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But there’s more to this than math. There’s biology, which happens to be my main beef. Try to convince a dairy cow that, because the milk truck will arrive an hour earlier tomorrow morning, she’d better pump up the volume tout de suite, or worse, tell her to hold that bursting udder for another sixty minutes because you’re planning to hit the snooze bar for the next six months, and you will likely form a new theory all your own. Cranky cows like to kick.

I follow the sage advice of my yoga teacher who for countless years has been reminding me, and a throng of other zen-for-a-moment seekers, to “Listen to the wisdom of your body.” This mantra has been sewn into the very fabric of me. Every molecule. It’s found in the strain of my downward facing dog DNA.

I know there are countless reasons to support DST, but there exist just as many for why it interferes or doesn’t make sense. My favorite?

Allegedly, in order to keep to their published timetables, Amtrak trains must not leave a station before the time printed. Therefore, when the clocks fall back in October, all Amtrak trains in the U.S. that are running on time stop at 2:00 a.m. and wait.

For one hour before putting it into drive again.

Sleepy, confused passengers are surely scratching their noggins over the clever corporate decisions made in that boardroom.

There is so much more to say on this subject. Seriously, I could … yawn … go on and on with my argument.

Instead, I’m going to go take a nap. See you in an hour.

~Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what we’re cookin’ in the Scullery (here) and what we all talked about down in the pub (here). And to see more of Robin Gott’s humor–all from the only pen carved from a human funny bone–click here.

4Mar2012

Lights, Camera … Wait. Where are the lights?

Posted in Cooking, entertainment, Family, Humor, mothers, Mountain life, Party, Survival, Virginia, Weather, Winter by Shelley Sackier

In addition to blowing out my hair, our lawn chairs, the flower boxes and a handful of shingles from the rooftop, our Herculean wind, blasting January through March across our mountaintop home, never forgets to tick off the last item on its ‘to-do’ list as a parting gift: it blows out the power.

I think of myself as a fairly prepared wanted-to-be Girl Scout, who, when throwing any kind of a dinner party—elaborate or no fuss—will write check lists in triplicate to make sure nothing is overlooked. Except it’s impossible to identify that one thing you overlooked when you’re looking at your list in the dark.

It happens with enough regularity to set a clock by, barring the fact that the timepiece I set repeatedly flashes twelve o’clock because the power has gone out yet again.

There’s nothing that ruffles my feathers more than the sound of silence where there was once the humming of my oven, six pots burbling on the stove top, Diana Krall crooning from the speakers and the tinkling of silverware as the table is decorated.

In its place is the, “Oof!” from my husband, falling up the stairs from the wine cellar—arms loaded for bear, the crash of glassware as my son who’s table setting loses sight of his work, my daughter’s cry of unheralded alarm at the loss of “IRRETRIEVABLE RELATIVISTIC QUANTUM FIELD THEORY RESEARCH!!” as she sits in front of a dark computer screen and a cackle buried deep within the roar of the demonic wind.

It is now that I consider the repercussions of snagging one of the bottles of wine still rolling down the hallway and heading straight for the comfort of my closet where I will shimmy out of whatever dreadful outfit I forced myself to wear for the evening and slip back into one of the umpteen pair of nonjudgmental-ever-forgiving yoga pants I own. I will curl up in a corner and if I’m truly lucky, find the wine bottle has a screw cap; otherwise, I’ll be forced to dig out shredded bits of cork with the back of an earring. (It’s been done before.)

Knowing I will never be forgiven if I pull that stunt, I take a deep breath, and use my mind’s eye to survey the damage in front of me. I’ve got hungry people coming to dinner and a dinner unfit for feeding said hungry people. And very shortly those folks will be arriving in front of an eerily dark house, believing they’ve got the wrong day, or we’ve changed our minds and went to bed early.

Just to add an element of apoplexy to my frenzied state, I remember my mother is staying with us, recuperating after some minor hand surgery, but so hopped up on Percocet, she continually mistakes me for either one of the servants from Downton Abbey or an old walnut armoire from her childhood bedroom. She will be trying to make it down the stairs solo or may have locked herself in a closet, believing it to be an elevator. If I don’t get to her straight away, I will soon find her at the bottom of the stairs needing substantially more Percocet.

Unfortunately, she’ll have to wait as I see a pair of headlights inching up the unforgiving driveway. Time’s up. Where the hell is my Plan B?

I hear my husband stub his toe on one of the spinning bottles and shout at the poor dog who’s announcing the arrival of our guests. I hear my despondent teen scientist sobbing at her desktop. And I hear my table setter holler, “Mom? Power’s out! Where are the candles?”

This last phrase is one that has repeatedly sent shivers down my spine. After every power outage I swear I will create a system of preparedness: memorable locations for flashlights, candles, matches and a corkscrew. And each time … I remember that sworn oath after the next power outage.

“In the apothecary chest,” I call back.

This goes on and on and on.

“Which drawer?”

“I can’t remember.”

I wait for it …

“WHAT?? WHICH DRAWER, MOM?”

Nobody sees me shrug in the dark, or cringe with self-loathing. I turn to speak in the direction of my young Marie Curie. “Please go help your brother find the candles.”

I can feel the rancor as she fumbles past me and know that it will mix with the already present hefty dose in the dining room. Nobody wants to search the apothecary chest. It has nearly one hundred drawers.

At last the blessed generator kicks on. It waits—an irritably long time—just to make sure that it’s truly needed, and that we aren’t simply testing circuits, or replacing fuses, or god-forbid seeing if it’s paying attention and ready to go.

Sadly, it’s too expensive to have the whole house wired to it. I remember the hot July day we had to pick and choose what we thought absolutely essential to have hooked up to the juice. Who needs heat? We laughed. Lights? Just the kitchen so we can find the marshmallows which we’ll cozily roast over our roaring fire. Microwave? Sure! We’ll make popcorn! Okay, that’s it, generator guys. Thanks for comin’ by and helping us ‘prepare for the worst’.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

I hear peals of laughter from the front hall where my husband must have greeted our guests. I hear my mother introduce herself as Hyacinth Bucket from her favorite BBC series. I look at my no longer burbling pots on the stove and sigh.

Then I peek into the dining room to see the mellow glow of firelight on wood, candles covering every surface and effusing the room with a spellbinding sentiment. I squeeze my children and whisper thank you.

Someone comes up behind me for a hug, hands me a bottle of wine and sniffs the air. “Mmm …What’s for dinner?”

I laugh. “Popcorn, marshmallows …” I look down at the bottle of Merlot and smile at the screw cap, “And wine.”

~Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery this week (here) and what we’re all talkin’ about down in the pub (here).