Ooooh, Ooooh, Oooooh....

The most remarkable telephone call came today: My middle, most geographically-distant daughter, asked me, via that wonderful invention by Alexander Graham-Bell, if I'd like to spend my Saturday and Sunday chatting in person with her and her tall, vivacious husband. Wheeeeee!!

In the context of a visit every six months or so, an impromptu trip by my red-headed dynamo daugher to see family in Baton Rouge is AN EVENT!! In the midst of (God willing) the last weeks of preparation for the sale of my Baton Rouge home, this announcement of an impending opportunity for hugs and kisses, wide grins and glasses clinked over family dinner with these "texas" family members clicked into my mental calender as another event squeezed into an already too-frenetic weekend.

On this morning, youngest dynamo was on hand to assist with the delicate application of stain to wood moulding at the ceiling of my kitchen, which is being gussied up for the on-sale debut. Unfortunately, a change in email address since her initial college aid application resulted in a last-minute rush to renew her student status sans "pin". A 1-800 call and a full hour of composing a new application form put us behind schedule. I was off to an orthodontic appointment and she was off to prep her managerie in anticipation of an 8-hour work day.

Soooo.... I tried to take to heart the entreaties of my youngest. "Mom...stress isn't the way to go!" I just couldn't shake the feeling of falling down a deep hole, with all the current responsibilities falling in on top of me. After a little while, when the miraculous curling iron tamed my misbehaved hair and I actually pulled out of the driveway in time to make the appointment across town, I was able to reflect on the wonderful things happening in my life: grandson walks! youngest child works and pays rent! faraway daughter comes home! Greyhound still loves me (no-brainer).

Soooo...at the orthodontist office, a techie eases the chair back, reaches in my mouth and proceeds to break a point off an expensive ceramic appliance, re-ties wires a couple of times, and finally flattens two tiny, rear-mounted metal "cleats" which heretofore held rubber bands each night to further enhance the braces experience. "Ooooh...I hope I can still get the rubber bands around them," I grunted. "You still wear bands around those?" she purred. "Unhh, yeshhh," I replied, with her hand still in my mouth. Tech: "Oh-uonnnn" (immortal words of my little grandson).

She wrenched and pulled and trotted out numerous instruments to torture those cleats back into a position which might accommodate the rubber bands, but one cleat end refused any posture that didn't torture my tongue. The doctor was called in to assess the possibilities: "Well, try this for a little while; if it still bothers you, I might have to cut on the cleat, but it's really involved."

I QUIT!!!! Stress rocks!

Surrounded

Bedtime. But not quite. My Baton Rouge house usually winds down around 9:00-10:00 p.m.; human and dog+cat mealtimes as well as "constitutionals" and last-time-around personal hygiene chores all hum to a conclusion in sort-of concert.
This night, however, the greyhound fretted back and forth between the hallway and my bed, giving the impression that he couldn't quite decide whether to jump up and give himself up to the "end of day" lay-about or "botherate" me to the point at which I interrupt my own end-of-day lay-about to discern the whys and wherefores of his disquiet. Tonight I opted for "get it over with" and followed him to the driveway door. I collared the pesky canine and we stepped into the 10:00 night. Always, when I am outdoors late on a summer evening, the locusts, crickets and sometimes frogs from the nearby pond surround me with a familiar, nearly hypnotic crescendo of their natural nocturnal musicale'.
Particularly did tonight's concert affect my mood and perception of being "in the moment." As I stepped from my home into the dark driveway and the street, the feeling of ease and security, which is to say, comfort, was seamless. No more insecure did I feel, while standing with my canine companion amid the noisy festival of night creatures and shadow of live oaks than I was moments before, behind locked doors in my tiled kitchen.

Yesterday I received the unwelcome news that my newly-adopted New Orleans neighborhood racked up a third and fourth murder for the year. (If there were more, I don't want to know about it.) In contrast to the security and calm that follows me in and out-of-doors in this unworried Baton Rouge neighborhood, the unrest and nervous "heads-up" caution I must maintain for basic safety when on the sidewalk in New Orleans now seemed to shadow me into the house after I locked the front door behind me in my beautiful, old and already much-loved bit of "Big Easy." Every sound and creak suggested danger and threat. Each bolted door and every drawn shade and curtain only seemed to guarantee that the tension would remain within.

I seek to resolve this circumstance of paralyzed emotions by reminding myself that, even on this quiet Baton Rouge cul-de-sac of nosy Republicans (who keep up with each other almost as regularly as they keep up with the weeds (not) in their front lawns) there are still those few who see a threat in every jogger, a murderous maniac in every unfamiliar pick-up truck.... I don't want to admit to fear of my surroundings beyond a natural caution toward the unknown and unproven. That, I've decided for now, is the context of this current case of nerves: until I know more about what goes on beyond my front door, I can't very well expect to determine a level of comfort inside or outside. So I'll give it some time and oblige the current state of alert -- rein in the imagination to an acceptable level of trust that things will settle in to a more-comfortable routine in New Orleans. Not the same as here, but comfortable in a different way, for different reasons.

Take me back....

Yesterday I finally advanced to the yard improvement stage of "appproaching house sale readiness." For months I've labored to push this home of nearly 15 years to assume a condition in which it may entice some upper-income, top-of-their-game yuppies to pay more than seems reasonable to me. A major piece of this yard-puzzle involves dumping some darkish mulchy stuff onto the flower/plant beds in order that they may join their bretheren across the street and around the blocks as indistinguishable examples of accepted landscape practice among those who can afford it. Never cared for the stuff, myself. I prefer my domestic plants to intermingle with grass, statuary, garden hoses, etc., lest they become snobbish. Same goes for people. That or they which or who associate only with like-minded folk soon relinquish all semblance of interest in and from others. Row after row of tract houses, with little more than a front door design or carport dimension to set them apart; suit after suit at lunch, each cocooning a waspy, boorish intellect bent on "rising" within its field: banking, real estate, law, medicine. Maybe I'm shedding my skin today and overly sensitive to the surrounding business world. Forgive me a lapse into judgmentalism (a word?)...living in Bush's world does this to me.

Yesterday I welcomed the chance to ask the nursery delivery person about the fishing gear pushed to one side of his covered pickup bed against 20 or so bags of pine mulch. "So, where do you fish?" I already guessed it probably was the Mississippi. These were some fairly heavy reels he was carting. "Just in the river. Catch catfish, mostly. Last week I caught one like this." He spread his hands in front of him to a distance of about 3 feet.

"Wow. So you use night crawlers, or what?" "Yeah, let me show you these." The young man, maybe 22 or so, leaned into the pickup bed and dragged out a 4-5 gallon white bucket, half-filled with dirt and leaves. I noticed right away that most of his bait was, shall we say, "expired". When the heat gets them, worms take on an anemic, whitish stickiness...unappetizing even to a catfish, I expect. "Look at this," I gestured. "Oooh, yeah. I pushed them to the front of the truck; I guess it just got too hot." "I dug lots of big worms as a kid. We fished in False River and found 'em along the fence line and under boards and stuff." "Well, they charge a lot of money for these" he said. "I just push some leaves over and they are all over the place." When I inquired further, he offered the name of a park near Scotlandville where mulch piles and landscape debris were always ready to give up buckets of night crawlers.

After the fellow had accommodated my need for stacking mulch here and there to facilitate eventual transfer to the various beds, we said our "thanks, nice to meet you's" and he took off, maybe for an evening of riverbank catfishing. I turned back to the house, planning a night of movie-watching and ribeye-grilling. More than anything, at that moment, I wanted to be swatting mosquitoes, barefoot and bending over a dirt pile, looking for wiggly earthworms to hook up with a hard-fighting bream or catfish from the False River pier.