The Circle of Life: Sometimes It Just Gets Broken

The Circle of Life: Sometimes it just gets broken and there is nothing to do but to deal with it. 

By Circle of Life, I mean where you grow in several stages.  This is MY perception of how it works based on my experiences.  Your results may vary, as they say in the commercial disclaimers.

Stage One:  as child dependent upon your parents to guide and mold you. For a while your parents are as Gods. They are wise, all knowing, the source of comfort and everything else that a young child must have.

Mom and Me

Stage Two: Soon, you grow into a teenager straining to find out who you really are. Ah...the teen years. Teen age angst.  What a trial for the parents.  You go out of ways to assert your independence and to just be contrary to all authority.  There is an ongoing power struggle between teen girls and their mothers, sons and fathers.  At this point you realize that maybe the parental units are NOT perfect or God like.  You've seen the cracks in the facade in some ways.   Perhaps it is the party where someone got a bit too drunk, was having fun and became embarrassing.  Maybe an uncomfortable argument between the parents.  Everything your family does is now worthy of an eye roll or two.

Stage Three: Thankfully we grow out of that teenager stage.  You go out on your own.  College, maybe. Get a job and an apartment of your own.  Move to another town. Now you begin to realize that life is more than being a child or an obnoxious teen dependent.  The bills keep coming in and you suddenly realize that ....Woah.....someone has to clean the bathroom, change the toilet paper roll and buy the food and all that stuff. This means I have to keep going to my job! and I can't just spend all my money on fun things.  Maybe that home and family thing was worthwhile.  Still figuring out who you are you experiment will all kinds of things. You might occasionally think about your parents and the fact that they were young at one time and remember some of their stories, if your parents were of a mind to share their own youthful indiscretions.   But mostly, it us all about you and your new exciting life.

Somewhere between stage two and three,  you discover SEX.  You are sure that it has never been this way for anyone before.  You are special..... THEN suddenly it dawns on you that your parents have had sex too.   At least once or twice, depending on how many siblings you have.  Eeeewwww!  This may require that I rethink my views of my parents and think about why they dropped us off at the theater every Saturday so we kids could spend the afternoon watching bad B movies......  Naaah.

Stage Four:   The real relationship stage.  You find a boy or girl that you like a lot and you discover that the 'way of love' is not all that easy.  It might work out and turn into marriage or you might find out that it is just a way of woe.  Suddenly, your parents seem to be more understandable.  Those arguments and quirks that they exibited that were so embarassing to you, make some sense.  You might be able to confide in your mother or father and even ask for advice.  They aren't Gods like they were when you were small, but.....somehow as you have gotten older, they seem to have gotten so much smarter. Amazing how that can happen.

Stage Five:  Marriage and children.  If you manage to make it past stage four, you are now married and have children of your own.  There is a moment where it dawns on you, perhaps when you are changing diapers or getting up yet again in the middle of the night to feed the baby or walk the floor at 2 am trying to console your colicky child.....WOW.  My mother/father did this same thing for me.!!! And I took it all for granted.   As a new mother or father, you will now be able to reach out to your parents for advice and ask them.  How did you handle this problem.  What was it like for you?  (They THEY are now Grandparents and working their way through their own Circle of Life.) 

Now, you can talk woman to woman or man to man.  You parents are morphing into friends and confidants.  People.  Not just parents, but people who have pasts, likes, dislikes.  As your own children grow and you deal with the intricacies of a marital relationship, this friendship grows ever more strong.

Stage Six:  Finally, you have gotten your children through their teen years and you also remember just what a little prick or bitch you were to your own parents.  (I apologized to my father at that point.) Your children are in Stage Three.    Ahhhh.  At last. The empty nest.  Free at last free at last.  Adults without young children and you can do the things you put off while raising the family.  Travel. Go to resorts and experience fine dining.  Sleep IN on Sunday and walk around the house in your underwear without a snotty teenager rolling eyes at you.   

Three Generations

Stage Seven:  Finally.  Grandchildren of your own to spoil.  Now you are the valued source of information.   

Somewhere in these last stages, you begin to realize the mortality of your parents and yourself.  Life isn't eternal as you think it is in your teen and young adult years.  Friends, family are dropping like flies and you realize that time is precious.  You'd better spend as much of it as you can with your parents if they still exist and your children and grandchildren before the circle stops spinning..

Such is the circle of life.  Wheel within wheels.  We are all on the circle at various points.  But....sometimes the circle breaks as it did for my mother and for the rest of us.

A Perfect Moment

The other day I had a perfect moment in an already pretty good day. 

You know.... one of those moments when you realize that everything is GOOD.  Despite what you hear, it can be good.  Things are fine, peaceful, calm and happy.  When you are suddenly thankful for the moment.  For the small things that make life worthwhile.  When everything somehow comes together to create that moment of perfection.

I was:

Standing at the sink:  listening to random selections of music from my computer. Preparing to make a new recipe that I have never tried before.  An upside down caramel apple cake.

Peeling the apples:.  Apples that we had picked from our orchard last fall. September.  The first year that we have had such an abundance of fruit.  The entire valley was filled with an unusual abundance of fruit.  People were begging to give away the abundance because no one wanted to waste the fruit.  We had kept several bushels of apples in the pump house and these were some from September.  Marveling at the ability of this wonderful fruit to still be crisp and golden delicious from months ago.

Looking through the garden window above the sink.: watching the light snow falling over the fields across the river below the bluff.  I could see the geese settling in to weather the storm. Watching them navigate through the snow and landing onto the field below.  So happy to have to have this view of nature and beauty instead of looking at the tired, dirty, soiled backside of another building.

Thankful for my warm snug house:  heat from the Wolf Range preheating adding to the warmth in the house.  Bright and cherry  (even on a snowy day) from skylights and windows that face the sun.

Appreciating the lovely kitchen that my husband and I designed  and built, 11 years ago.  A kitchen where everything is exactly where I want it to be.  Everything at my fingertips.  Spices, flour, utensils.  My kitchen is a well oiled machine. 

Anticipating how this recipe might turn out.   Hoping that it will be a "keeper".  Waiting for my husband to come home from YET another hard day of physical and dirty work.  Work that he loves and work that keeps us able to enjoy this life.  I appreciate how hard he works...so now that i"m not making the big commisions in stock trades....I peel the apples.

Listening to the music with half an ear....suddenly it all jelled, when this song played

It had it all. 

A perfect moment in a really great day.  Life is GOOD.

AND the cake turned out fabulous.  Here is the recipe on my other blog.

**Added:  I laugh everytime I watch this video because the people dancing are just hilarious.

What I Love About Christmas.....What I Hate About Christmas

Ah...the most wonderful time of the year.  Ring ling a ling.  Christmas is here.  Fa la la la la.  Bah humbug.

I'm always conflicted about the Christmas season.  There is much to love and much to not love.

In the past, before marrying Mr. Dumbplumber and when I was working for minimum wages at a crappy job, standing on my feet for 8 hours a day and living in a crumbling shamble of a marriage, Christmas was a time of stress and hardship.  With no money and no happiness in my life, I "put on a happy face" for my child.  Keeping up the fantasy of Christmas was tiring, discouraging and depressing.  We didn't have family close by so we rarely had any  gatherings of relatives.  No Norman Rockwell Christmases.  Christmas was also a time to remind me how alone I was and isolated from family. We had presents, mostly hand made because I couldn't afford much else. I was the only parent who participated in the Christmas decorating or the Christmas spirit.  We did have good food, cookies, candy, cakes and all the trimmings.  THIS I can do on a shoestring.

Christmas to me, as an adult, always represented deprivation, hardship and inadequacy.  My daughter didn't know this and her memories of the holidays are good.  My job as a parent was successful: to protect your child and allow them the joys and fantasies of the holidays.

Things are different now and money isn't an issue, but the stress is still there.  Like a cat that has been conditioned by evil scientists with shock treatments, I still am wary about the holidays.  My wonderful husband says......GET OVER IT.   So I try.

Today, there is much to like about Christmas and much not to like.

I love to give presents.  To think about what the person needs and wants and to see their appreciation of the gift is priceless. To try to find just the right thing for each person.  I still hand make many of my gifts because I like to do so. It isn't out of necessity now, it is out of love.

I hate wrapping presents.  I don't do a very good job because I'm impatient.  My packages look like a team of   Chimpanzees did the wrapping.  Frankly, I really don't see much point in spending lots of money on wrapping, bows, glitter and all that stuff.  The package is going to be ripped open and the effort put into making it "pretty" is going to be burned in the trash barrel shortly after Christmas along with the other boxes and trash.  Those gift bags that can be used over again are a brilliant invention.

I love decorating the tree.  Each ornament.....mostly hand made from salt dough, knitted, quilted from fabric scraps or assembled from feathers from wild game we had killed and eaten, has a memory attached.  Granted some of the memories are not so good, but others are.  The fun that my daughter and I had making the hair of Santa's salt dough beard with a garlic press.   The time we were able to buy a special ornament, that ceramic skating teddy bear or the glass prism stars.

I hate decorating the tree, because all the while I know that I will have to clean up all this stuff.  The prickly tree will attack me and leave welts that itch and last for weeks. The lights become impossibly snarled.  Each ornament will have to be put back into the boxes or wrapped up for protection.  Knowing that as time goes on after Christmas, the tree will begin to look sadder and sadder and eventually be thrown out to be burned.  What a waste of time.  I'm always tempted to just throw the whole tree out with the lights still attached.

I love the cooking.  What a great excuse to make mounds of goodies.  To try out new recipes and give the results to friends.  The holidays are a cooking fanatic and recipe junkie's best time of the year.  Inviting family and friends over for a big feast is something I look forward to.

I love the fact that Christmas is when the days begin getting longer and that we are turning the corner of the short days, dark cold nights to the promise of spring and summer.  To every season...turn turn turn.

I hate that my birthday is just after Christmas.  January 6.  Epiphany.  A birthday party was always an afterthought.  I think I had 3 birthday parties as a kid.  Everyone else was burned out by the holidays from Halloween through New Years.  Who wanted to have yet another party? Generally, it was just..."Oh...here is an extra gift for your birthday under the tree".  I suppose it could be worse, my father's birthday is Christmas Eve.

In addition, many of our Christmases were spent in Mexico visiting with our relatives who lived in Mexico City or traveling to and fro to get there and back.  Most of the childhood memories I have of Christmas are those with a Mexican tradition, not American.

I love some kinds of Christmas music.   My favorites are the traditional tunes that are about the religious nature of Christmas.   THIS is one of my favorites.

I hate the Christmas music that is everywhere beginning shortly after Halloween it seems.  In the grocery store, on all radio stations.  If I have to hear Santa Baby or Rocking Around the Christmas Tree  one more time, I'm going to find a department store Santa and beat the crap out of him.  Ho....freaking HO!   I think Christy Lee must have finally biffed it since we aren't bombarded with her advertisements.  Thank you God.  Having Christmas shoved down our throats 24/7 really doesn't put me into the holiday spirit.

Which brings me to one of my biggest hates about Christmas. I HATE the merchandising The commercial buy buy BUY THIS STUFF attitude.  The relentless shoving of products and brainwashing of the children to demand ever more gifts and ever more expensive gifts.  I guess this goes back to my first issue of poverty and Christmas.  As a parent, you often just can NOT get that Barbie Dream House, new bike, game system or whatever.  The children, especially those who still believe in...you know who....don't understand this and when the gift they have their heart set upon getting isn't there, they think that maybe there is something wrong.   Did Santa not like them this year?  Were they bad? Terrible children?  So in order to not disappoint your young child and to not appear to be an inadequate failure of a parent in the eyes of your children, you cave into the merchandising frenzy and go into debt for toys and items that often are just later discarded or wear out.

I try to think about the good things, remember WHY we have Christmas and to appreciate how much better my life is now.  You do need to have experienced the downs in life to appreciate the good fortune you have..... and I am very blessed indeed. 

Merry Christmas.  Have some delicious cookies and don't let me wrap your presents for you.

A Beautiful Sunday

It is a beautiful Sunday. The weather is clear, crisp and still warm enough to work outside in shirtsleeves. To get into the mood and ready for a leisurely Sunday drive this afternoon to view the magnificent colors ....A little Nat King Cole.

The Bigfoot of Cats

(Post written by my husband the Dumbplumber)

The tenth anniversary of finishing our new home also marks the arrival of a tiny kitten. Wifey and I have made a profound discovery. Many have been to our home, but other than ourselves less than five other people have ever seen our cat, our neighbor excluded. (He caught her twice in a live trap)

We don’t have a lot of visitors, but those that do come by only hear stories about the schizophrenic cat because she never reveals herself to others. And of those that have seen her, none have ever touched her or been within reach to do so. We did have one visitor about five years ago, my former grade school teacher, that actually had dinner with us and watched the cat casually stroll across the living room. We would like to use his confirmation as evidence of her existence , however, he took his testimony to the grave two years after his visit. It has become such a joke over the last ten years: Fewer people have seen our cat than have seen Bigfoot.

When we say it’s our cat, we really don’t mean it. She trained us to feed her ten years ago, never left, and has taught us to do many more things for her since. We actually thought about posting a story about the cat on our blogs with photos of the cat’s favorite resting spots, one near the dining table window,  another near the office window, another on the railing sheltered by a wild plum tree and of course the one on the bed. However, these photos would be much like those of the places Bigfoot was spotted, but instead of footprints, we only have cat hair to mark as evidence.

Office window spying on the quail.

We could also do a time lapse photo of her food bowl, slowly diminishing, but you would be confused that the water does not. That is because she prefers either the toilet bowl or her favorite larva infested stagnant pool outside in the garden bowls left for our local birds and other wildlife.

Sparky's afghan on the bed

And speaking of birds, we are left with much evidence of breakfast birds, lunch birds and the occasional afternoon ‘snack’ bird parts littering our yard and deck area. No, she is not a neat cat.

However an argument can be made that it is the local foxes leaving their calling cards. But I maintain that foxes do not do their bird hunting during the daylight hours and they certainly don’t drag their feasts near our house for devouring. No, it’s the cat. It is our policy (due to the many predators here ‘bouts) that we leave the cat indoors when we leave overnight. We joke that she is stationed as a ‘guard cat’, and I must report that, over the past decade, nothing has gone missing with her on duty.


About our only complaint is that we receive little in return for providing food, water, shelter and security from the cat. Her interaction with us is minimal at best. She sleeps on the wife’s side of the bed, she allows very little petting (preferring to present her tail for stroking), passes infrequently over the sofa for the cursory touch, only lounges outside on the deck when we are there, as guards, and spends the entire day lurking outside, scouting hidey holes and available critters.

Favorite railing sunning spot

She will not come when called and prefers showing up for her four o’clock treat, somewhere between 3 and 5, depending on the time of year and accuracy of her fur covered kitty clock. Timing has never been her strong suit. But she is given credit for never having clawed, chewed or shredded the furniture. That, she saves for her personal pedestal which has been fashioned into an homage to Edgar Winter.

Shredded cat perch.

Overall I should not complain. Having never been a cat-person, I do appreciate her low maintenance, but live in wonder at how many 50lb bags of cat food has been consumed by our 4lb cat over the years. About the only thing she demands of me (since I refuse to acknowledge that she is my cat) is to open the back door, then close it, then open it, then close it, then open it, then…well, you get the idea.



And on this tenth anniversary of her arrival, I would be less than honest if I didn’t confess that on more than one occasion I have dreamt of the day when we would be cat-free. No cleaning the litter box, no vacuuming the cat hair, no lugging 40 lb. bags of Cat Chow out of Costco, no listening to the wifey’s daily, screeching/calling of the cat, which no doubt is enjoyed by neighbors on both sides. But on the bright side, her going missing, or worse, could be assuaged by popping the cork on a new bottle of 25 year old Single Malt and hailing a toast to one of the least troublesome intrusions ever into our lives.

Swimming in the Past

Lately I've been reminiscing about things in the past. Maybe it is my age...."young, young" my hubby and I always chant when we think about it. But face it. No spring chickens we.

Maybe it is the times we are living in, where we see the America of our youth changing, not to the good, and we see it slipping away. I imagine my parents thought the same thing in the 60's and my grandparents in the 30's. Its a generational thing.

Maybe it is that I'm going to be a Grandmother for the first time and now I'm thinking even more seriously about the next generation and wonder what his/her childhood memories will be like. The idea that Hip Hop music may be the "Oldies" of the future for my grandchild is unsettling.

About the Grandmother thing. YAY!!!! Awesome. I can hardly wait. And I plan to post more about that later.

This post is about reminiscing about the past, so back to my meandering thoughts. On another blog the conversation turned to swimming and which is better. The Ocean or Lakes. I say Ocean is better.

I grew up mostly in California and swimming as children in the summertime was where ever our parents took us.

We learned to swim in summer programs at the local high school. Every day of the week over many summers we would be dropped off for an hour of swimming lessons. Starting with madly kicking our way from one end of the pool to the other behind floaty boards to eventually being able to master the butterfly stroke. Then we would have a lunch break where the pool closed for an hour. My brother and I would walk across the street to the small Mom and Pop grocery store on the corner. We would suppliment our bag lunch with sodas, pretzles, ice cream bars and for my brother the latest edition of The Green Lantern or other comic to add to his collection.

After lunch we would go back and swim for another couple of hours for open swimming. This is when all the kids in the area would ride their bikes in from all over the neighborhoods or their parents would drop them off, pay 50 cents or so to swim. Then we would play and frolic in the water and the sun for hours.

Imagine it compared to today. NO sunscreen, resulting in massive sunburns. No adult supervision other than a few lifeguards. Kids playing and yes bullying, pushing, shoving, dunking without hovering parents or other adults to interfere in the fun. Freely able to wander around the neighborhood. Buy junk food if we wanted. Today parents who allowed these sort of things would be arrested for child abuse. However, we as children LOVED it.

I became quite a good swimmer and was on swim team in high school.

Occasionally, on a weekend, my parents would take us to a company picnic at a local reservoir. Those were fun times but the swimming was terrible. This is where I got my distaste of lake swimming. The only way to swim was to wade out through the weeds, muck and who knows what that your feet could feel on the bottom of the lake until you got out to where you could actually swim for any distance.... if you watched out for boats.

The Ocean is where the real swimming and best summer swimming memories lie for me. As a teen growing up in California if you didn't surf, body surf or at least go to the beach and hang with your friends who surfed, you were a nerd. That word didn't exist then, but the concept sure did.



Beach Boys, Jan and Dean. Hot summer sun at the beach. Cool cars cruising the main in the balmy California summer nights. Clean hot beach sand. The boardwalk with the carnival atmosphere, rides, more junk food.


And of course, warm beer bought by that cool older guy or gal that you happened to know, liquor pilfered from the parent's stash. My parent's later told us, they knew all about it, but figured it was a part of growing up just as they did in the 40's. Rites of passage so to speak. As the 60's morphed into the 70's, beer morphed into other illegal recreational substances and the music morphed into Jefferson Airplane and The White Rabbit, Tower of Power and Bump City.......but enough about that. I'm about to be a Grandmother for God's sake. (smile)

Moving away from the coast to the Sierra Nevada mountians:
I loved to swim in the mountain rivers and streams. The Feather River, before they drowned it under a huge resevoir was wonderful. No crud on the bottom of the river. We would take an ice chest full of food, drinks and walk down steep trails and over flumes to get to the swimming holes and spend all day. You couldn't swim for any distance like I was used to doing, but the water was wonderful to float upon and dive into. Getting down to the river was a challenge. Getting back after a day of 'recreation' was even more so.

Crystal clear and very cold rushing water while the granite boulders were hot from the baking sun and would immediately soak up the wetness from your skin. There were deep pools between the rapids, where the water would be calm and clear. I would dive to the bottom and fluff up the sand and pick up gold nuggets and interesting rocks that had been hidden for years and years. I have a worn down ring that I wear every day that was made from those nuggets and a beautiful rock that I rescued from a deep pool. I've carried both of these with me for the last 30 years.

I look at the rock and imagine the millions of years it took to create it, polish it and wear it down. I imagine the trillions of gallons of water that carved it from a larger shape to what it is now. To me the rock represents time and endurance. Ah....time.



After they drowned the river, we would go swimming in the middle of the reservoir from houseboats or floating platforms anchored off shore. It was strange and slightly erie to think that our previous summer swimming holes were lurking 50 to 80 feet or more below our feet. Never to be seen again. Dark and now covered with silt. Existing only in our memories which will vanish when we do. No bottom anywhere. Just steep mountain sides on most of the rim of the lake.

The memories of swimming. I hardly swim anymore unless we are someplace where there is a pool or we are at the ocean where it is warm. Now when I go out in the sun to swim or to lounge around, sunscreen and hat are the norm. Probably too late to protect my skin from the hours and hours in the sun as a child and youth and young adult, but I wouldn't trade the memories for anything.