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Some of the neighbors go all out for Halloween with spider webs dangling from trees, inflatable green-eyed monsters in the front yard and skeletons crawling up the house. If I really want a good scare, I scan emails in my junk folder or listen to messages on the landline.

Diplomat Joe McDonald has been trying to reach me to let me know that a sealed box worth $8,000,000 has arrived at JFK airport with instructions to be delivered to my doorstep.

If I were to email Joe back—which I will not—I would tell Joe that we live in a safe neighborhood, but $8,000,000 seems like a lot to leave on the porch.

Joe can’t dispatch the box until we pay $155 for a yellow tag.

Hey Joe, rip open the box, take out $155, and leave the box on the porch. We’ll let the trick-or-treaters dip into the cash and be the house that put the treat in trick-or-treat!

I also receive scary emails from people on their sick beds. If I were so sick that I couldn’t get out of bed, I’d be emailing health care providers, not some stranger I found online.

I was recently contacted by someone claiming to be Nelson Mandela’s daughter (from her sick bed). She has $15 million she would like to give me to use for charity. Imagine. A host of international contacts and she chooses me to do business with. That’s just creepy.

If I were to email back—which I will not—I would say that I am glad to assist, but there will be a brief delay while I register as a 501(c)(3).

BOO!

I also hear from people who want to sell my website. They charge 3 percent “success fees.” I’m more interested in their “failure fees.”

Even if I’m not interested in selling, they’ll pay me $50,000 if I give them the name of someone else. Easy money. I thought that was the domain of Washington, D.C. I guess ghouls just wanna have fun.

Then there are the terrifying messages on the landline. If we dimmed the lights and lit a few candles, we could be a haunted house.

“Your car warranty is about to expire.”

Ha! Beat you to it. Our Explorer has 215,000 miles on it!

“Amazon calling. A $700,000 order was placed on your account. Please call to confirm your account login and password.”

“Your computer will crash unless you call back and let us take it over remotely and provide two credit cards and a bank account number.”

The best one?

“This is the Social Security Administration calling to notify you that due to fraudulent activity, we have issued a warrant for your arrest.”

Heart stopping, but if someone is already on their way with a warrant, why would I need to call back with my name, address and Social Security number?

These messages are as fake as plastic vampire teeth dripping blood. They are laughable. But they can make you batty.

 

We’re thinking about getting one of those Ring Doorbells that notify you on your cell phone every time someone is at the door. A lot of our family and friends have them. They look like a lot of fun, chiming in the background of every conversation and meal, dinging whenever a car, runner or four-year-old on a ride toy passes by.

Plus, we’ve been missing out on the thrill of huddling before a notification of someone at the door after dark, poised to call 911, then discovering it is only an Amazon delivery. A Ring doorbell could be what we need to keep our reflexes sharp.

The real reason we would get one is because our bell keeps ringing but, when we go to the door, no one is there.

Sure, we hear giggling, but we don’t see anybody. We don’t look left or right, just straight ahead like we don’t have an ounce of curiosity or a brain cell to spare.

We close the door. The bell rings again. We open it again. More laughing again. We are about to close the door again when a kid or two or three jump from behind wicker chairs and yell, “SURPRISE! Did you know it was us?”

No idea. Never could have guessed. Not in a million years.

“How in the world did you kids get here?” we ask, seemingly oblivious to the minivan the size of a tank pulling into the driveway.

A 3-year-old pipes up and says, “We walked!”

“All that way on those little legs?”

She nods yes.

“You kids must be tired and very hungry.”

They hadn’t thought of it before, but now that we mentioned it.

“Come on in, we’ll get you something to eat.”

Our kids used to do the same thing to my parents who lived 500 miles away. They’d beg us to stop the car, let them out at the top of the hill and give them a head start. They’d race down the hill, ring the bell and Mom and Dad would open the door feigning shock and surprise.

“You walked all the way from Indiana to Missouri?” they’d ask.

“Yep.”

“All alone on I-70?”

They’d nod yes, as though we, the parents, thought that was a fine idea.

“Clear across half of Indiana, all of Illinois, through East St. Louis, across that big bridge that spans the Missouri River and all the way to Kansas City?”

“Yep.”

It was an old gag and they never got tired of it. The kids or the grownups.

We have a couple grands who live 50 miles to the south of us and appeared at the door not long ago claiming they had walked.

“You must be exhausted,” we said.

Exhausted nothing. Their eyes danced, their faces beamed and they doubled over trying to contain laughter because they fooled their ol’ grandparents once again.

Nothing more to do at that point but open the door and get the party started.

We all need to muse more and fall is the perfect time for sitting, pondering and reflecting, particularly in front of a fire. So says a piece I read recently. This was good news because all our adult children have outdoor firepits. Lucky for us, from time to time we are invited to join them.

That said, I would never be able to muse around our son’s firepit in the country, as I would be on edge waiting for wild animals to charge out from the woods in the dark, snakes to slither around my legs or bats to sweep down and tangle themselves in my hair. There are firepits that call for reflection and firepits that call for adrenaline.

Fortunately, two other firepits we frequent are tucked into suburbia where wildlife appears by appointment only. We were around a firepit the other night as the sun set and the flames danced.

The air was tinged with a hint of melancholy, which I assume is essential to musing along with any beverage named pumpkin spice. I was thinking how the grands have given us more joy than we could ever give to them (the beginnings of musing) when two of the darlings began arguing over a chair. The tussle escalated and required parental intervention.

Things settled down, then the makings of s’mores arrived. Soon kids were jumping up and down, waving long forks with sharp metal tongs bearing flaming marshmallows streaking against the night sky. The window for musing had passed; it was now time for first aid readiness.

A trail I frequent is lined with trees that form a canopy overhead. In fall, it is like walking through a painting in which the colors continually change. It would be an ideal place to muse, but it’s also the time of year black walnut trees drop their fruits. A ripe black walnut is like a small green tennis ball filled with concrete, then rolled in an oil slick. They hit the trail with a crack and would make a similar sound against one’s skull. You must be wary of what is overhead while simultaneously watching for black walnuts littering the path, waiting for you to trip, roll an ankle, twist a knee and send you spiraling.

It’s hard to be vigilant and muse at the same time. Musing on the trail hasn’t panned out, but my kick-the-can skills, as applied to black walnuts, are top-notch.

The other day I sat on a bench in the backyard to linger a few moments and enjoy the colors. Truthfully, I had paused to check some dings on my cell phone. The wind picked up and gold and crimson leaves spun to the ground. I looked up to see where they were coming from and saw a jet trail overhead. I remembered a flight I needed to book and dashed inside, preempting any and all musing.

I’ve added musing to my “To Do” list. Musing hasn’t happened yet this fall—and it may not ever happen this fall—but perhaps there is now reason to look forward to a long, cold, snowbound winter.

I had a confession to make on the drive home.

“I almost jumped out of the swing,” I said.

Our son-in-law built a great swing set structure in their backyard. Two swings hang from thick rope anchored to an arbor. The hardware holding the swing is rated to hold 400 pounds. I can’t help but wonder who he had in mind when he calculated that weight load.

In any case, one of the girls invited me to swing alongside her. We pumped and pumped, enjoyed the wind on our faces and sailed higher and higher touching the sky with our toes. We stopped pumping and savored the easy glide back and forth, back and forth.

Swing therapy. If it isn’t a thing, it should be.

All of a sudden, I was possessed with the notion of jumping from the swing.

I could visualize it and even feel it. I could see myself slowing down, waiting for the arc, letting go and jumping.

And then I could see my knees jamming. Both of them, but the left one the most, because it had surgery twice when I was a kid. I was also able to visualize a lot of screaming and the part where they scraped me off the ground and trucked me to the nearest ER where an orthopedic doctor would look at me with incredulity.

And yet, I still considered it.

Oh, the call of freedom sailing.

Time is a tricky thing. The outside of you ages chronologically, but a big part of you on the inside is forever 17. That is the part that plays ball with grands in the backyard, arm wrestles with the ones encroaching on adolescence and lies on the floor hoisting little ones in the air on the bottom of your feet playing airplane.

It is also the part that imagines you are still capable of doing a cartwheel. Step, hand, hand, foot, foot. Done. Or better, a round off. Run, run, run, run, spring, twist, land with a thud, arms in the air.

I see these things in my mind and I can feel them in my limbs. A little voice in my head whispers, “You can do it. You can do it.”

Then a much louder voice in my head screams, “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR EVER LOVIN’ MIND?”

Perhaps. Possibly. Probably.

“I honestly considered jumping out of the swing,” I tell the husband.

“I did it,” he said.

“When? I didn’t see that.”

“It was a couple of months ago when we were all at that park.”

“Was that why you were complaining about your knees hurting?”

“Yep.”

“Worth it?” I asked.

The answer was that he probably won’t do it again. At least not from that height.

In the interest of responsibility, let me say that people of a certain age should not jump out of a swing.

But you can still enjoy imagining it.

We’ve been doing a lot of sniffing here lately.

Usually, the husband is the one handing me something from the ‘fridge saying, “This smells bad. Here, see what you think.”

These days I’ve been the one waving things under his nose.

The husband got a one-two punch from COVID and lost his sense of taste and smell. Day Three, mid-afternoon, a couple hours after eating a grilled cheese I’d made for lunch. And no, the cheese had not expired.

He was on the couch and said, “I don’t think I can taste or smell.”

Just like that. Astounding.

I did what any wife would do. I minced some garlic, held it under his nose and said, “Here, see what you think.”

Nothing.

I tried some mesquite rub. It’s potent mesquite that clears your sinuses and keeps them clear for three years.

Nothing.

The next time he saw me coming, he pretended asleep.

I consulted our primary care physician, Dr. Google, and read a theory that COVID shocks nerves in the nose. The reading suggested trying to awaken the nerves by doing a sort of “smell therapy.” The premise of trying to wake something up made sense.

I loaded little containers with spices and extracts. He held them under his nose twice a day for 20 seconds at a time, then ranked his sense of smell from 0-5. There were a lot of 0’s and .5’s the first few days.

He couldn’t smell or taste, but he could chew, so I made foods with crunch. I stopped short of deep-frying broccoli in a buttermilk batter.

To help entice his sense of smell, I stunk up the entire house making salmon. Nothing.

Garlic bread. Nothing.

Barbequed chicken, smoked on the grill. Nothing.

About two weeks after this all started, I made Sunday brunch.

“Do I smell bacon?” he asked from a room away.

Oh, the magical powers of bacon.

An upward trend emerged. Slowly. He is regaining taste and smell, although yesterday he said a blueberry coffeecake I’ve made for years seemed “tasteless.” (The man lives on the edge.)

It’s impossible to say if “smell therapy” did the trick or if his sense of taste and smell would have returned on their own.

We do not take vision or hearing for granted, but we have taken smell and taste for granted. We just assumed. We never considered not being able to taste or smell.

These days we are giving thanks for the food before us with a deeper sense of appreciation—all the while inhaling every wonderful aroma.

It’s been a rough year for the garden. By mid-July the tally was 49-0 with rabbits, squirrels and raccoons for the win.

They grazed through petunias, lilies, sunflower starts, destroyed phlox and mowed an expanse of zinnias like a lawn tractor with zero-turn radius.

The main component of my flower garden was tufts of fur from rabbit tails. They’re soft enough, but they just don’t look all that great in a vase.

They also harvested beans, broccoli and an entire sweet potato planting.

Many mornings I would s stick my head out the back door and yell, “Would you like that steamed or oven roasted?”

This triggered laughter, followed by baby cucumbers thrown at my head.

They were hard core. Ate everything straight up. Make that straight down—to the ground.

They grew increasingly brazen and danced Conga lines across the patio with fresh parsley hanging from their mouths.

“You’ll get yours one day,” I shouted. I didn’t know what “yours” was or when “one day” might come, but it felt good to heckle them as the gardening season inched away. Then the red-tailed hawk came.

It was lean and hungry and had a wicked glint in its eye.

We hustled small children inside with instructions to stay away from the windows.

A couple of weeks later, the hawk left.

Twenty pounds heavier.

Took that hawk six runs before it could get airborne.

The hawk left satisfied and so were we.

There was still a chunk of growing season remaining and leftover seeds in the garage. I planted zinnias and daisies, all of which sprouted and started to bloom. These encouraged battle-weary phlox and renegade larkspur to return on their own.

Then the ultimate challenge: I tucked a fresh round of cantaloupe and watermelon seeds into the ground thinking they might just mature before the first frost. There must have been 50 blooms on the cantaloupe vines and 20 on the watermelon. But no fruit.

Then one day I was giving a friend the Poor-Me Pity Tour of the garden and she spotted a cantaloupe hidden beneath a vine. It was a whopping 2 inches in diameter.

A few days later, I was checking on the cantaloupe and spotted a teeny, tiny icebox watermelon, deep green, perfectly formed that was the size of a penny.

Every day I checked one cantaloupe and the one watermelon. They were growing—slowly and ever so slightly, but maybe, just maybe.

Last week I checked the “crops” (I feel entitled to use the plural since there are two melons, not just one) and gasped at the watermelon.

A critter had eaten through the side.

Our last great hope is the cantaloupe. We will be up against first frost date, but if the temperature dips, I will tent it and sit beside it all night with a thermal blanket if necessary.

I envision a pageant of sorts when it is finally ripe, gardeners cheering, throwing peat moss in the air and waving trowels as it is transported to the house.

Then, for the grand finale, we will put it on a silver platter, and all scoop out a bite. With demitasse spoons.

It won’t be much, but it will be one in the win column.

 

I have received some splendid thinking-of-you gifts lately and it’s not my birthday or anything.

A paper bookmark sits on my desk with each letter of the word “Grandma” drawn in a different color. It is a large bookmark with zigzag ends and a small heart cut out of the middle. You slip the corner of the page you want to bookmark into the heart.

Genius, right?

Last week I received a new pillow. The pillow is pale pink with a tiny green and white floral print and measures about 10 inches by 10 inches. Each seam is sewn straight as a ruler. We also have homemade pillows made by grands in a bright sunflower fabric and a bold camera print. We didn’t know we needed more pillows, but this was made with love, so you can bet we’ll find a place for it. It will be a prominent place because there are pillows and then there are pillows.

Next to family pictures sitting on our bedroom dresser are several small rocks and a dried black walnut that were gifted to me. These treasures were not parted with casually. They were mined from the earth with grubby hands and loving hearts.

A letter sent for no special reason arrived the other day with a sweet note inside. A paper star also fell from the envelope. It is blue with a red heart in the middle with the letter G written in the center of the heart. I can pin the star with a “G” on my shirt.

I imagine this will be akin to wearing one of those medic alert buttons, only my paper star doesn’t connect to first responder services.

Thoughtful. Very thoughtful.

Sometimes I receive short stories or newsy letters and remind the authors that this is exactly how many famous authors got their start. Maybe.

A few weeks ago, the doorbell rang and there stood a boy, beaming from ear to ear, holding a shoe bouquet of wildflowers. Cheerful black-eyed Susans, wild geranium and Virginia mountain mint, all tucked into a shoe. A worn, dirty, mud-caked, tennis shoe. It was a beautiful award-winning bouquet. Best in Shoe.

 

The boy also had an old blue Ball jar that he had discovered digging near an old cabin on their property and gave that to me as well. Plus, he wanted his mud-caked shoe back. It was a good trade.

If you see a woman with colorful pillows under one arm, a book with a bookmark hanging from it tucked under the other, assorted artwork, small rocks, a dried black walnut, a wilted wildflower bouquet in a blue Ball jar in her hands, and a paper star with a “G” pinned to her shirt, please point me out to others and say, “There goes the richest woman in the world.”

It took me two days to watch a documentary that was an hour and 15 minutes long. I tend to lose consciousness when the action is slow and the dialogue ends. “School of Housewives” was slow, but good.

Please, do not confuse “School of Housewives” with “Housewives of Atlanta, Beverly Hills, New York City” and wherever else women bounce about, day drink and swipe long acrylic nails at one another.

The School of Housewives stands in Reykjavík, Iceland. Most who attend wear sweaters and Birkenstocks.

The school has been running since 1942. It was popular in the ‘50s and ‘60s with waiting lists but has struggled of late. According to the director, attendance correlates with the economy: when the economy is good, there is a downturn, and when the economy is bad, there is an influx as people are more interested in economizing.

Students learn how to cook, host, garden and put out kitchen fires.

Much of what they learn was a flashback to my junior high home economics class, a class in which my projects were often notated “needs improvement.”

A teacher at the School of Housewives said students were not there to collect grades, but to collect wisdom, and know how to work with their hands.

If only my home ec teacher had embraced that attitude. I eventually self-educated through trial-and-error, watching early Martha Stewart and phoning my mother.

Some of the things these students learn are basics I have been doing for years. I was thinking I might go to the school. You should, too. We all should. It would be nice to be validated as actually knowing a thing or two. We might even get advance placement status.

A couple of the male students have great praise for the school. One said it reinforced who he is as a conservationist, learning how to make better use of one’s things and using things as long as you can. Students learn how to knit, crochet, sew clothes, reattach buttons and mend holes.

When they’re not fixing something, they are cooking something. Detailed cuts with razor sharp knives into pastry were works of art. I wanted to reach through the screen and sample one of everything. Well, at least until they started making blood sausage.

Then there was the sequence with the head of an animal. I purposefully drew a mental curtain, but I do recall as they tore it apart for cooking, they were instructed to discard the eyeball and rip out the cartilage in the ear.

Waste not, want not.

I was already at the point of wanting not.

Students also learn to weave. The click of the loom is soothing and watching a pattern come together is amazing.

Reflecting on their stay and all they had learned about keeping a home, one student tenderly said, “So much happens here. It’s just a wonderful life.” What a lovely thing to say of any home.

Of course, a few probably left “needing improvement.” But as a one student mused upon entering the school, if she failed here, she could always go to YouTube.

The documentary is streaming for free until the end of September. You can find it by clicking here 

Many mornings I check CDC stats for my state and county to weigh the facts against the hysteria. Then I check the headlines to see what blew up overnight and to see what is still standing.

We live in turbulent times: Covid, Afghanistan, schools opening, schools closing, rising crime. Pick one.

Or how about the housing market? A house on one end of our street just sold for $50K more than a house with the same floor plan, on the other end of the street, six months ago.

It’s a great time to sell. But what can you buy?

Then there’s the rising cost of groceries. I was loading my online shopping cart and a gallon of milk showed up as $10. I did a double take. It was a computer glitch, but for a few seconds it gave “Got Milk?” new intensity.

I did a mental tally of how many in our extended family have been tested for Covid. Nobody has had it—something we do not take for granted—but nearly half of us have had a Q-tip jammed up our noses. Several were tested after close exposure to someone who was positive, someone else needed a test before a surgery and then there was a summer round of head colds and sniffles prompting a flurry of “just to be sure” tests.

Oh, the times we live in.

We’re not the first to say that.

Others said it during World War I, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, World War II, polio, Korea, the fight for Civil Rights, the quagmire of Vietnam and the horror of 9/11.

We personalize upheaval and uncertainty as unique to us and our times, but upheaval and uncertainty have always been part of life and history.

There’s a saying that “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” Some say it is an old English proverb, others attribute it to Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose four-term presidency spanned the Great Depression and World War II. The man knew a thing or two about rough waters.

Smooth sailing doesn’t reveal what we are made of—it’s when the waves crash, the wind screams, and the night is long that we learn what we’re made of.

Checking my sea legs now. So far, so good, but the nausea is awful.

Rough seas may be with us a while longer. No one knows for certain and it is uncertainty that sends us reeling.

Previous generations were better prepared for upheaval. Necessity made them more self-reliant.

Funny how the words and voices of others come to mind during challenging times. They serve as anchors.

Churchill said, “Fear is a reaction; courage is a decision.”

It looks so easy, words in print.

If ever a sage calls from the past, it is Abraham Lincoln. “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.”

Perhaps it is awareness of our insufficiency that keeps us on edge. Or on our knees.

May we steady ourselves and sail on.

One good way to keep grandkids coming around is to keep cool toys around. Not expensive toys, necessarily, but interesting ones like parachutes, butterfly nets, ride toys with obnoxious sirens and horns, plastic bats and a thousand plastic balls, old buckets, assorted sizes of rakes and snow shovels, galvanized tubs and a 9-setting nozzle for the garden hose.

That said, there are times you should drop some hard, cold cash. On grabbers.

For the uninitiated, a grabber is a hollow aluminum rod about 3-feet long with a jaw-shaped contraption on the end that you open and close by squeezing a lever on the handle. Grabbers enable grabees to grab things out of reach—cookies on a high shelf, interesting things on stacks of boxes in the garage, your cousin’s leg, your cousin’s arm and your grandpa’s hat right off his head.

Our two grandsons were with us for a short weekend and noticed shiny new grabbers hanging in the garage. They immediately inspected them and demonstrated how to adjust the angle of the jaws. We’d never noticed that before and probably never would have.

There wasn’t much (or many) to grab in the backyard, so we suggested branching out. We asked if they’d like to pick up trash. They were ecstatic. Their thought process probably went like this: “If they take us to pick trash this time, maybe they’ll take us dumpster diving next time.”

Keep dreaming, boys. Keep dreaming.

We grabbed plastic gloves, buckets, a 30-gallon trash bag and headed to a neighborhood strip mall known for lackluster maintenance.

I told the boys we were putting the Broken Window Theory into practice. Their eyes grew huge. Grandma was talking trash only moments ago and now she’s talking broken windows.

“It goes like this, fellas: Trash, litter and broken windows may seem like small things, but they can lead to an increase in crime. Before you were born, the mayor of New York City put the Broken Window Theory to work and had graffiti erased and broken windows repaired nightly. The result was a decrease in crime and the Big Apple became known as one of the safest big cities in the world.”

“Cool! Can we go there?”

“Um. Maybe someday.”

Our destination did not disappoint. Stores, a gas station and bus stop all provided a hodgepodge of finds. Big plastic cups, empty soda cans, beer cans, tiny liquor bottles and disposable coffee cups with lids and stir sticks accounted for the greatest amount of trash.

The problem with “disposable cups” is that a lot of people take it to mean right where they are at the moment.

Tobacco products and masks were the second most frequently found items. Empty bags from the big three of fast food nutrients— crackers, cookies and chips— made an excellent showing as well.

The best find of the afternoon? A smashed car bumper.

“No, we’re not taking it home!”

Although it was productive couple of hours, albeit gross and smelly, nobody wants to go back soon.

That said, the parking lot looked good.

For a whole two days.