Tidbits III

by Donna Schoenkopf

When I water the “yard” a spray of tiny baby grasshoppers explodes out of the grass. Hundreds of them. They are adorable.

The cottonwood tree is now twice as tall as my house. It shades the whole eastern half of the house. It drapes over my roof and its branches hang low, making a room of shade on the deck.

Hummingbirds love it.

It is also the lone tree on the top of my rocky hill. That makes it a lightning target. I have been trying to work out the physics of lightning traveling down the tree into the branch that hangs over my roof. By my calculations it will hit where my lightning rods are not.

So, I am (maybe) putting an expensive lightning protective system on it ... which requires ordering all the stuff off the Internet like last time and hiring my electrician guys to climb the tree with all that copper cable and gadgets and widgets ...

Or cutting it down.

Luckily my California State Teachers’ Retirement pension fund is sending me almost TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS extra this month, because they are smart little cookies and actually made more money than they projected and so they’re divvying it up with us retired teachers.

We’ve had another twenty-four hour healthy, gentle rain, with more to come all week. It’s like the Northwest right now. Lush and green and cool. I’ve opened all the sliding glass doors so that heavenly air floats through the house.

My hair loves it. So does my skin. Water is life.

Tuesday is Allergy Shot Day. This Tuesday I sat, as usual, waiting for Terri the Nurse to come out to get me. The receptionist did not acknowledge my presence. I think she’s still mad at me for making a very slight disparaging remark about Michael Jackson when I saw his funeral on the waiting room TV. One of the TV commentators had said something like, “Michael Jackson will be remembered forever,” and I blithely said, “Well, maybe not FOREVER.”

That sealed Receptionist Lady’s hatred for me. She never liked me much, but now, ooooeeeee. I just seem to rub some people the wrong way. I think I’m either too cheery or too loud. Neither of which I seem to be able to tame.

The medical clinic I go to stinks. Intense B.O. in the stairwell and a kind of vaguely fetid odor from the carpets. There are also cleaning chemical smells everywhere. This is not a good thing for a medical clinic to have. If you are smelling something, it’s the result of molecules of that substance going up your nose and exciting your smelling cells.

Eeeeeeek.

Doctors’ offices and hospitals should smell clean. Not phony clean. Real clean.

They need to open some windows.

Ooooops. They HAVE no windows.

Bad mistake.

Staph infections have become a nightmare for hospitals these days. I heard of one hospital having to take down whole walls in their operating rooms to remove staph.

Eeeeeeek again.

I wonder why all the magazines are gone from my doctor’s waiting room. There used to be fabulous gardening magazines. They’ve been swept away, leaving only a Diabetes Monthly and a Lancet medical magazine. Oh, and two Bibles.

At least FOX isn’t on the TV, as it is in all the other waiting rooms in this place.

Navigated around the giant pile of dog shit Diego laid at the cusp of my compost area. What a GOOD DOG!! It repels those foraging possums and raccoons. Having a dog in the country is good. They mark the territory for you.

Every day, in every way, I work at erasing Diego’s memory of the terrible blows I rained on him when he attacked Che the Cat. 

He is a good dog.

Andrew and Thomas out at Lowe’s are my two heroes of the week. I have had weed whacker trouble. My old rechargeable weed whacker finally won’t take a charge anymore, so I went to get a new one. I bought the cheapest one because that’s how I roll. Took it home. It literally (no poetic license here) snapped its line every two minutes until I almost went crazy rethreading that sorry excuse for a weed whacker.

Grinding my teeth, I returned to Lowe’s. The Return Girl called someone to determine whether or not it was returnable. (It was covered with caked-on grass and had practically no line left.)

Andrew arrived. He is small, young, Asian, and has an inscrutable face. He took one look at it and said, “Oh, yeah. I’ve had this one. It ALWAYS snaps the line. Give her her money back.”

He showed me the two inch give in the line which caused it to snap.

So she gave me my money back.

Then I asked Andrew where the batteries for my rechargeable would be and how much they were. He told me they were about $35.

Too much.

So he took me back to the weed whacker section and asked me if I wanted the gas weed whacker someone had returned. It was originally $169, but he would give it to me for $35.

OKAY!!

THEN he took me out front and showed me how to operate it.

He’s terrific.

BUT the gas weed whacker was snapping ITS line when I got it home and I decided I wouldn’t return it because I thought that would insult Andrew. Instead, I would go ahead and get those $35 batteries for the rechargeable.

I went to the weed whacker department to find out which battery would work in my rechargeable and there was Thomas, who asked me how long ago I had bought my rechargeable and I said, “About a year ago.”

“Have the receipt?”

“No.”

“Never mind. Here’s a new one.”

DANG!

Went home, used the BRAND NEW rechargeable, figured out the line problem with the gas one, and for two days now I have been weed-whacking my heart out.

I am a two-fisted weed-whacker, baby.

The pond is gorgeous. It used to be just a red-colored muddy thing. But Peewee told me to throw my old dry wall into it to plug the leak (it lost a foot of water a day ... okay, this IS poetic license) and lo and behold! It not only stopped the leaking but it promoted plant growth. Now the water is crystal clear, there are pretty floating plants and lots of underwater plants in it, and the other day I saw a GIANT fish.

The grass is slowly filling in in my front “yard”. The plumeria tree my darling daughter brought me back from Hawaii loves it on my deck.  I have two new tomato plants and a fabulous basil plant producing their little hearts out there too.

I joined Facebook.

I just cleaned up the hardened cat vomit under my bed. I saw it there when I was changing my sheets. I pulled the bed back and discovered the lower half of a rather small frog, about an inch and a half long, next to it.

So THAT’S where the frog went that Che was chasing in the house.

Have you ever noticed how the lower half of a frog, when stretched out on its back, looks just like a human?

A pretty good sized frog (about the size of a seven-year-old child’s fist) climbed effortlessly up my glass sliding glass window two nights ago.

Another one the same size jumped three feet in the air when he saw me looking at him through the sliding glass door.

My cherry tree is utterly and finally and completely and absolutely dead. I am very sad about it. But my two apple trees struggle on.

Oklahoma is spectacularly beautiful. Lushness. All kinds of trees and thick grass. The sky is never the same two days in a row. Storms sweep through. Rains fall. Sun beats down. GORGEOUS clouds. I repeat: GORGEOUS CLOUDS!

The grass grows two inches a day through the slits in my decks.

Every morning I wake up happy.

Night time in the country is very intense. There is a LOT of action out there in the dark.

I had a dream the other night. I was with a man. I loved him. He loved me.

I felt safe.

Is that why I am uneasy at night? Because I don’t have a man? I am not scared. Not at all. Twenty years single. But ...

I actually started looking at my house through the eyes of a person who lived with another person and thought about building a combination tornado shelter/closet for my man to put his things in. It will be right outside the eastern sliding glass doors.

Naaaaaaaaaah.

It’ll pass.

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