The roads in Tennessee are like the spokes of a wheel. The hubs are Nashville, Clarksville, Chattanooga, and Memphis with roads radiating out from the hubs 360 degrees and crossroads running perpendicular linking the spokes. The closest visual description I can give is bullet holes in a car windshield. There are no straight roads, all roads wind around something. Google maps cannot locate most destinations. From the moment I drove away from the Nashville Airport until the day I returned, I had no idea where I was.
When a spouse dies, it seems that the one thing all widows and widowers have in common is loneliness. Even those who appear to be living a normal, happy life are secretly lonely. For those who have not lost a mate, you wouldn’t understand the emptiness of missing the other half of who you are.
My mom was widowed at the young age of 51. It took her years to find happiness in companionship again. Up until that day, I witnessed her trying to make it through each day lonely, and it was sad. I was living in the same house at the time and helped to maintain the property.
Living in a small house behind us was the old widower, Swede. He had lost his wife to a stroke many years before my dad was killed. Swede handled his loneliness by sharing his home with his rescue-dog, Digger O’Dell, and medicating with his friend, Canadian Mist. Swede at this time was in his mid-80s. He was a man’s man. He was employed, as a teenager, on a steam tug which hauled log booms across the sound from the Olympic Peninsula to lumber mills on the Seattle and Tacoma waterfronts. As he got older, he was a spar tree setter, meaning he climbed to the top of fir trees in a logging site and set the block for the cable which pulled the downed trees up to the log trucks. His last job before he retired was as a lineman for the power company.
Swede taught me everything I needed to know about hunting, and fishing and he loaned me all the guns and fishing gear I needed to get started as a real outdoorsman. Although he wasn’t an educated man, he knew a little bit about everything.
One day, when he was only slightly under the influence of the Mist, he ambled over to our house in his overalls where mom was busy sewing in her study. He knocked on the back door and mom answered.
“Well good morning, Swede. What brings you over on this sunny spring day?” she asked.
“Well, gal-darn it, Pat. I was wondering if we could have a spot of tea,” he said in his best British accent.
“Of course,” she said, and invited him in. The two sat at the dining room table for an hour talking and sipping tea.
Outside, at this time of year there appeared to be a blizzard. The tall cottonwood trees to the south of us were losing their cotton and the breeze was carrying it through the air and into the yards on our side of the street. The ground was covered and looked like there had been a light snowfall. As the cotton floated up against the house, it began to pile up like snow drifts.
Cottonwood tree cotton
It was a yearly event for us, and everywhere else in the county that had Cottonwood trees was experiencing the same blizzard.
Because people with allergies get plugged up when the cotton floats by, they assume that the cotton is the allergen, but this is not the truth. The cotton has no allergen in it but because it is sticky it picks up allergens from grasses and other trees that do have pollen. So, the cotton is just an innocent carrier.
“Look at that gal-darn cotton,” he said, and he pulled out his handkerchief to blow his nose. “It’s nothing but a mess. It blows into my house and gets all over everything. Even my dog, Digger O’Dell, comes in from outside looking like he has been rolling in a snow drift.”
“I know,” mom said. “This afternoon I have company coming over and the driveway and sidewalks are covered. It will get tracked into the house and make a mess.”
“I plan on sweeping the sidewalk before they come, mom,” I assured her.
“Well hold on, gal-darn it,” Swede bellowed. “You don’t need to sweep nothing. I’ve got one of those electric leaf blowers. That will get rid of it.”
It seemed like a brilliant idea. Swede ambled home and returned with the blower and a large coil of extension cord draped over his shoulder. Digger O’Dell walked closely by his side.
“Find some place to plug the cord into, Marty. I’ve got to try this out. We could be the hit of the neighborhood.”
Finding a plug-in in the garage, we unrolled the cord and plugged in the leaf blower. Swede turned it on, and starting out on the lawn, he began blowing the cotton toward the house. Instead of staying on the ground, it became airborne again and turned into another blizzard. Still, the old man thought it was doing some good and he kept swinging the blower back and forth, moving the cotton around.
In mom’s rock garden, was a small ceramic maiden who had been there for years. She said that it made her happy when she looked out through the kitchen window and saw the maiden out in the garden. Swede, now blowing cotton through the garden, accidentally hit the maiden with the air blast which toppled her over breaking her head off.
Swede shut off the blower and we both stared at the maiden. We didn’t know how mom would react to the bad news.
“Gal-darn it!” or something like that, Swede mumbled. “I’ve got some Super Glue in my kitchen drawer next to the sink. Run over to the house and get it. We’ll glue it back on before your mom finds out.”
Running over to Swede’s “house of confusion,” I found the tube in the same drawer with two bananas, which had been over-ripe a long time ago. There was always something rotting in his kitchen. I made a hasty return back to Swede just to get away from the smell.
“Slop some of that glue around the neck and stick the head back on,” he told me. “And don’t get any of that goop on your fingers or you’ll glue them together.”
Carefully gluing the neck, I gently placed the head back on the body and held it there while the glue set up. I handed the tube back to him and he placed it in the back pocket of his coveralls.
“Looks good as new,” he said. “Don’t tell her we broke it.”
“We broke it?” I asked.
“Come on,” he growled. “Let’s finish with this cotton.”
The blowing once again started but the cotton was impossible to control. It just mounded up in big drifts against the base of the brick house. Swede shut off the blower.
“Well, this ain’t working like I thought,” he said. “It’s like trying to herd bubbles. Even if we blow it beyond your house, it’s all going to blow into my house. We have to think of a way to get rid of it.”
“How about a shop vac?” I suggested.
He pondered that idea for a moment.
“Hmmm, maybe,” he said quietly.
Then, an idea popped into his mind, through the haze of the Mist.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “Go over to my garage and bring back the weed burner. We’ll torch the cotton.”
It seemed like a good idea to me. With a jack-of-all-trades like Swede, I could trust his good judgment. I brought back the propane tank with the hose attached to the weed burner.
“Okay, I’ll show you how to turn this thing on. Here’s the striker. You take it around the house where the cotton drift starts and start burning it this direction. I am going to take a sit-down on this garden stool and have a snip of the Mist while you’re working.”
He sat down and rocked back and forth until he felt comfortable, then pulled a flask from his coveralls. While he sipped, he played in the drift with his boots.
“Gal-darn stuff,” he mumbled.
Going around the house to the start of the drift, I set down the propane bottle and opened the two valves. Hearing gas leaking from the burner, I held the striker out in front of it and scratched a spark. The explosion was louder than I had expected. I rubbed my mustache feeling the hair fall off in my fingers. Taking the tip of the weed burner, I carefully placed the flame into the drift.
Did you know that cottonwood cotton burns like gun powder? There was a bright flash, and it was gone. And the flash shot around the house, and I heard a loud scream.
“Bring the gal-darn garden hose and put me out,” he yelled.
Mom, hearing the commotion, came running from the house. She had never seen Swede smoke so bad since he had his five pack a day tobacco addiction. The laces were burned off his boots, and his coverall legs were setting off small sparks, but a good squirting of water put him completely out.
“Well, these coveralls are shot,” he grumbled. “My butt feels like it’s on fire. Check me out.”
He stood and turned around. There was nothing burning, but his back pocket appeared to have some discoloration. I walked up and took a closer look. It had the familiar smell of super glue.
“You sat on your Super Glue tube,” I said. I tugged on the seat of his coveralls, but they did not pull away from his body. His coveralls and boxer shorts were adhered to his right buttock.
“Well, gal-darn it! Take me to the hospital.”
By the time we entered Emergency, Swede was nearly completely self-medicated and barely felt any pain at all as they cut off his clothes. After careful examination and consulting between themselves, the nurses gave him some cream for his now hairless legs, and it was decided that the simplest way to deal with the glued area was to leave it, and the cloth would gradually pull away from the skin. On his medical chart, next to the name, Swede, the nurse put in parentheses the second nickname for the cantankerous old man — “Patch.”
When we left the hospital, his boots and coveralls had been tossed into the garbage. He rode back home in socks, a pair of Depends, and a hospital gown. He smiled at the crowd in the waiting room as he passed through, and commented all the way home on how cold my vinyl seats were.
As time went on, Mom found herself a good job, made new friends, and toured the world. She later remarried, and the loneliness slowly faded away.
As more women in the neighborhood became widowed, Swede and Digger had more homes to visit for a spot of tea. Whenever I would stop over to check on the old mountain man, he had to keep reminding me, “The name is Swede. Stop calling me Patch.”
Highway 99: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the travel trailer Aloha. Its three-week mission: to explore strange new sites of interest between Bellingham and Chihuahua, Mexico while being pulled by a high mileage Oldsmobile sedan. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no Mitchell family has gone before!
The difference between the words sweety and sweaty is one small letter, but the consequences of using them wrong is catastrophic.
I had just mass-emailed a letter to various members of my church intending to say in one of my statements, “My wife is a sweety.” It was my own fault for not proofreading before sending the statement which the predictive text feature changed to “My wife is sweaty.” The responses came back almost immediately.
Cheryl and I were sitting in our favorite lounge chairs in the living room. I was busily scanning through Facebook and reading comments on my latest post. Cheryl set her book in her lap and said to me, “I’m making borscht in the crock pot for dinner.”
It came as no surprise to me when I Googled the question, “Which side of the family does the color blindness gene pass,” that the answer was, “The back side.”
June 4th, 1988, in the maternity ward at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
I can still hear the mocking lyrics from Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones coming through the overhead speakers:
“You can’t always get what you want, yeah
You can’t always get what you want, yeah, child
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you just might find
You just might find, you get what you need, ah, yeah.”
It all happened one night, as most of these things do. My wife Cheryl and I were sitting in the TV room eating popcorn while watching a show. The other three step kids were already in bed.
She turned to me and said, “I’m pregnant.”
Very rarely listening to her while I am concentrating on watching my show, I said nothing.
She jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow.
“I’m pregnant,” she said again, looking at me for a reaction.
“Huh?” I said through a mouthful of popcorn.
She pointed to her belly. “I’m pregnant.”
I later vacuumed the popcorn up off the carpet.
And so began the nine months wait, and I want to point out here that I am spelling wait, W-A-I-T.
It was an exciting time. All the family was thrilled and eager for the new child.
We went in to have the ultrasound done and were asked if we wanted to know the sex of the baby. I said, “No, maybe after its first birthday.”
The reason was, I knew that this baby was a boy. As a matter of fact, I had already named him: Caleb John-Paul Mitchell.
Caleb, for the man who Moses sent into the promised land, who said all things are possible. John-Paul which were the first names of Cheryl’s dad, and my dad, and Mitchell, just in case he wanted to live with us.
I already had plans for my son. Helping him through Boy Scouts. Showing him how to hunt and fish. Cheering him on at sporting events. It was going to be a great father and son experience.
The nine months went by quickly. It was easy for me, although Cheryl complained a lot.
We attended Lamaze classes, and I learned all the things that I shouldn’t say and do around a pregnant woman.
And then in June, we were walking through a back alley in the Fountain District to talk with my insurance agent, when suddenly Cheryl’s water broke. Naturally, there was not a section in the Lamaze class to tell me what I should do about this.
“We’ve got to get to the hospital,” she moaned.
“But we have cloth seats in the car,” I said. “Let me throw down a tarp.”
She never understands the practical side of things.
We got to the hospital and were immediately checked into a room. Two rooms down, a woman was screaming and swearing at her husband.
“Are they doing exorcisms here too?” I asked the nurse.
The labor pains began and increased through the day. Cheryl had some too. I, remembering what I had been taught about breathing techniques in the Lamaze class, began coaching Cheryl in her breathing. I was a little insulted when both she and the attending nurse started giggling. Apparently, I did a great imitation of King Louie from Jungle Book.
Late that afternoon, the dilation reached 10 centimeters and the nurse suggested that I should have my eyes checked.
With a couple of huffs and puffs, the baby started to come. He was face down. The head was a little pointy, but I figured that I could round it off again. Then came the shoulders. Fine broad shoulders. He had a strong upper body which would be good for rope swinging later on.
Continuing on out, I noticed the cute little butt. He’s taking after me I thought. So far so good. And as he continued to roll over in a front somersault, I thought I saw the indicator that I was hoping for. Joy to the World!
The nurse quickly carried the baby out to clean him up. Returning a short time later with him swaddled in a blanket, she gave him to Cheryl, and they bonded.
Then Cheryl asked, “Would you like to hold the baby?”
The nurse put him into my arms. And clumsy me, the swaddling blanket fell off, and I was totally shocked. The indicator wasn’t there. I checked the floor. In a panic I looked to Cheryl and then at the nurse. This is not what I had planned for.
From that moment on, Caleb John-Paul became Kalene Elizabeth.
And over the sound system, Mick Jagger sang, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
I could see him from a distance. We had known each other for years and though he stops over occasionally, I have never really learned to enjoy his company.
It started with a cow – as most stories do. I was sitting at the breakfast table eating my daily fried egg and cinnamon roll, when I noticed my Pyramidalis hedge which parallels my west property line shaking violently. What manner of beast is tearing them apart this time, I wondered. The hedge looks the way it does now because the deer seem to find it incredibly tasty in the winter and they can only reach up so high. So, I went outside to see what was going on and there I found my neighbor’s cow chewing away on the backside of the hedge.
Deer trimmed hedge
Now here is the thing about my neighbor – he is the world’s worst rancher. There is a five-acre field which borders my property on two sides. The owners of the field live somewhere in Arizona and pay no attention, or care anything about the field or their house which they left. Therefore, since the field is up for grabs, the rancher runs his cattle on it.
Now, in the summer this is fine since the grass is growing in the field and the cows keep it mown down, but in the winter, the cows eat the grass down until there is nothing left, and they look elsewhere for something green, which lately has been my yard.
I do have a barbed wire fence around my property which is meant more as a boundary line marker than to keep animals out, but there are three strands on the fence line. The problem with hungry animals, whether cows, horses, elk, or elephants, is that they don’t care about fences when they want to eat what’s on the other side of the fence. The cows will come up to the fence, push the top wire down with their neck until it pulls the staple out of the fence post, then they will do the same with the middle wire, dropping it down. Then they merely have to step over the bottom wire, and they are in my back yard.
One Sunday morning, as we were getting ready to go to church, I raised the garage door and stepped outside. In front of the garage door were three piles of cow poop. There was cow poop down the sidewalk in front of the house and my ornamental hedges had been chewed on. To make matters worse, there had been heavy rains, and the ground was soggy. The cattle, who circled my house all night long, punched a trail into my grass. There were holes all over the yard.
Now, you would think that the rancher neighbor would do something about the mess, but calling him, he said, “Sorry about that. You need to fix your fences, so they don’t get into your yard.”
“Huh,” I said. “Let me get this straight. I must sink hundreds of dollars into my fence line to keep your animals out because you aren’t giving them enough feed and they are starving. They are your animals, why aren’t you maintaining the fence lines?” And that’s as far as it goes. My option is to be an ornery neighbor who calls the Sheriff or Humane Society and turns him in or come up with another plan.
And the plan was this: I would run a strand of electric fence wire parallel to the property line barbed wire fence that the cows keep destroying. I would place it three feet out into the field so there was no way that they could get close to the barbed fence. This would cost me the materials and the power to run it, but it would keep them away from my yard.
After a trip to the farm store, I came home with fence posts, wire, insulators and a stinger box which hooks to the power. It cost a mere, well, I don’t want my wife to know. It was an easy job setting it all up with the ten cows standing behind me overseeing my work. When it was complete, I plugged in the stinger and watched with glee as the cows each tried it out. This was the fence line on the north side of my property. The cow field also borders the west side of my property, but that part was closed off so the cows couldn’t get into it, and it was overgrown with tall grass and blackberries. The rancher saw this as an opportunity though, another way to keep from feeding his cows. Last year he came over and opened up the fence into that field to let the cows roam in the tall grass.
During the summer, I noticed the west fence being pushed down. My grape arbor and the fruit trees which were mere feet from the fence line were stripped of leaves and fruit. My lawn next to the fence line was chewed short. So, I chased the animals out and closed the entrance to that field but the hungry cows, much like elephants, pushed it down and regained entry, which takes me back to my breakfast and the Pyramidalis hedges.
I already had the electric fence on the north side of the property. It would be easy enough to attach another wire to it and run a line down the west side of the property the same way I had done the north. And this is how my day started to unravel.
I keep my old farm truck parked quite aways from the house back in the trees just so people driving by don’t think that it is my main source of travel. If I was to go to the Feed Store to pick up fence posts, I needed to use it. So, I hiked back into the woods to the truck, and walking around the back of it I noticed that the license plate tabs were expired.
Huh.
No problem, I’ll walk back to the house and buy the tabs online. Getting back inside, I climbed the stairs to the office and sat down in front of the computer.
The Department of Licensing web site is easy to use but the first screen required me to provide a license plate number and my last name so they could bring up the vehicle. The last name was easy enough, but I didn’t have the license plate number. I strained my eyes at the truck through my office window but couldn’t read the plate. No problem, I’ll go downstairs and find the title in the file cabinet. It has the license number on it.
After clunking my way downstairs and finding the title, I slogged back to the office and put the license number into the computer. The web site kicked it back saying the plate number was in error. Ah! I have owned this truck for so many years, I have had to change the plates. Okay, I’ll walk back out to the truck and get the number. The upside was that I got my steps in for the day.
Luckily, the license tab renewal store was right next to the Farm Store. Taking back roads, to avoid the police, I was able to pick up the new tab and apply it to the plate. Then, walking next door, I picked up 12 fence posts only costing me a mere, well, no sense letting my wife know.
Upon returning home, I quickly set about putting the new posts into the ground in the west field, three feet from the barbed fence. Then satisfied with how the posts looked, I strung the electric wire from one end to the other. This was not happening without the full audience of cows standing around in a half circle offering advice. As I was getting to the final process of hooking the west line to the hot north line, I noticed a buckskin Jersey cow walk to the north electric fence and put an insulator with its wire in her mouth.
Huh. I wonder how long the north electric fence hasn’t been working.
Completing the wiring hookup, I went into the shed to get my voltmeter. It’s not like I go into the shed much in the winter, so when I opened the door and looked inside, I saw that all the tools on my bench were lying on their side and there were tools strewn across the floor.
Huh. What has Cheryl been looking for out here. We’ll have to discuss tool shed etiquette.
Now, the tool shed is not sealed tight and during the cold season, cats will come inside and climb up onto the plywood lying in the rafters. Sometimes, I’ll find kittens. It looked and smelled like a cat had been in my shed.
I found the voltmeter and started straightening up the tool bench which may have created somewhat of a racket. Then, I bent down to pick up some tools off the floor when suddenly, something of great weight hit me in the shoulders. The four sets of claws in my back told me that it hopefully was a cat. The blind-side tackle from the rafters pushed me forward through the door, out onto the lawn. Lying on my face in the grass, I turned my head to see a very large feral Tom Cat disappearing across the yard.
Huh.
Testing the old power stinger with the voltmeter proved that the unit was indeed dead, although, there was a red LED light on indicating that it was working. Liar!
It was 5:45. I didn’t know how long the Farm Store stayed open, but I thought that I must try, so I hopped in the old farm truck with the new tabs on it and sped into town.
I was able to get to the store before it closed and I purchased a new stinger for only, well, I really shouldn’t say.
Back at home, the cattle were grazing in the west field when I installed the new stinger. I checked it with the voltmeter, and it did indeed work. I watched a bull mosey over to the new wire. He stuck his head under the hot wire, eating grass next to the barbed fence. Then, he lifted it up and the back of his neck came in contact with the hot wire.
A startled bovine makes a unique sound, different from their other unique sounds. I’m sure that in cow language it is profanity. At any rate, he jerked his head back and ran into the center of the field taking the fence wire with him. The wire was stripped off each insulator of each fence post.
Okay, try again. Luckily the wire wasn’t broken and after shutting off the power, I re-strung it. Then after repowering the system, that buckskin Jersey walked up to the north fence and stuck her nose out at the north hotwire.
“Don’t do it, Daisy,” I thought.
She did. I guess she can figure out how to get herself out of that cherry tree.
The rest of the herd made a strange sound. Possibly they were laughing.
It was starting to get dark, and the last thing to do to make sure that the fence was ready was to weed eat the tall grass which could come in contact with the hotwire and short it out. I went to the garage and brought out my weed whacker. Climbing over the west barbed fence, I started knocking down the grass in the three-foot section between the barbed and the electric fence. In the dusk sky, on the back side of the Pyramidalis hedge I turned a bit to work the whacker under the barbed fence and I accidentally stepped backwards into the electric fence.
People in the neighborhood said they saw the arc flash in the night sky and heard someone scream in possibly an Asian language. The charge only lasted a second, but like a near death experience it seemed like hours. I was able to see all the major network stations, as well as Prime and Netflix. There was a Spanish speaking show I watched but couldn’t understand a thing they were saying.
Rubbing the back of my leg after regaining my senses, I heard the semi-circle of cattle making a strange noise. Possibly they were laughing.
That though, is one sure-fire indicator that your electric fence is working.
The animated version of the Disney movie, Peter Pan, was released in 1953. Disneyland theme park opened in 1955. I was born in 1955. Are you seeing the connection? I grew up in the era of Wonderland, of the lost boys, of never wanting to grow up, of wanting to fly . . . and sometimes occasionally wearing green tights.
My sister Tricia recently brought me a manila envelope which she had been keeping in storage. The envelope was stuffed with memories of my dad, Paul Phillip Mitchell. I poured the contents out onto the floor. Included in the pile were newspaper clippings of his life and his military documents from WW2.
In 1973, while I was at Northwest Nazarene college in Nampa, Idaho, I had an opportunity to attend a concert which changed my impression of Christian music forever.
You know, a lot of young newlywed guys come up to me and say, “Hey Mard, you’re incredibly old and wise. (They got it half right) Can you give us your observations on having babies?”
I could hear Cheryl in our bedroom closet. She was finding dress shirts for me.
“Ah nope, ah nope, ah nope, ah nope.”
“What is the problem?” I asked.
“You haven’t got one shirt that doesn’t have ball point pen ink stains on the pocket,” she answered.
I have a theory. The makers of dress shirts and the manufacturers of ball point pens are owned by the same corporation. The pens are designed to leak, leaving an ink stain on the shirt pocket thereby requiring me to go to JCPenney. Four new dress shirts had to be purchased. We were going on a cruise.
It has been quite a few years since I have been to the mall, and I believe that it’s safe to go back since the statute of limitations has run out. For a while there, my photo was on the wall as a wanted fugitive in the mall cop’s office. Well, the only photographic evidence is of a man looking like Daddy Warbucks running through the crowd.
