Number one: Candied Beets. (I told you). Why at Thanksgiving would you serve a dish that looks like cranberry sauce? Why would this dish not be clearly labeled “Beets”? What are you supposed to do with a large mouthful of beets while red juice leaks out of the corners of your mouth, and you are sitting around the dinner table with 15 relatives? Unforgivable!
Number two: Commercial super roll toilet paper. You know the type: two 12” diameter rolls with a mile of paper each, housed in a dark plastic wall mounted container. The paper is not the issue. The custodian leaving the roll taped up is the issue. I have literally spent a half hour spinning the roll trying to find the loose end. Somewhere a custodian is giggling. Unforgivable!
Number three: Technology. Why do they have to keep upgrading my operating system? Why do I have to invite my granddaughters over to show me how to work my phone, my TV remotes, the microwave? Why can’t Pong still be played on my computer? I really need technology to stop for about six months just so I can catch up. It’s all very unforgivable. Which brings me to my wife’s friend Becky and her Pekingese dog Ginger.
Somewhere, deep in the woods of northwest Montana where there were outlaws and no laws, there lived a man named Ardis Staylee. In Ardis’ town a four-way stop meant that whoever got to the intersection second, stopped. Buying license tabs or getting permits was an inconvenience that no one bothered with and those who were chronic troublemakers one day disappeared deep in the woods and were very rarely found.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. (Origin Unknown)
Ricky Dandelion, the man, the myth, and the Whatcom County legend, sat at the kitchen breakfast table busily trying to fill letters into a New York Times crossword puzzle. It was not unusual for him to create words using only consonants. He studied the page as he tapped the pencil eraser against his forehead.
“What’s a seven-letter word for “senior helper,” Venice?” he yelled into the next room. “The third letter is a “P”
His wife, Venice, was pulling clothes out of the dryer and folding them. In her full-length cotton farm dress and her hair in a white bonnet, she almost appeared to be dancing with the long sleeve farm shirts and bib overall pants. A Bluetooth speaker filled the room with her favorite hits from the CD, The Marvelous Hollis Quince and the Yodel Aires.
“Depends,” she yelled back.
“On what? Come on, don’t play with my mind, lady.”
“The answer is, Depends. Try it.”
“Depends,” he muttered while erasing his choice of the word “repeats.” “Huh, it works. How did you come up with Depends?”
“Something just triggered when you said the third letter was, P.”
“You’re a wordplay genius, Venice. A wordplay genius.”
Today was another busy day on the Dandelion ranch. Earlier that morning, Ricky had been outside checking his garden to see what else was not coming up as expected.
Earlier in the spring, Ricky had planted three rows of green onion bulbs only to find that they flowered into daffodils mid-summer.
The cattle in the backfield had been sent to the butcher the previous fall. They were replaced by two less obnoxious animals, alpacas. I say less obnoxious if you can overlook the fact that they both spit like two ranch hands at a poker game.
This time of year, they were both given their summer shaves by Venice. She only knew one cut style, the same one she gave to Ricky. There was always the question of “Who wears it better?”
The other rescue critter they had this season was a potbelly pig who Ricky named Hammond. This was in reference to the fact that if the pig rooted up the potatoes in his garden once more, Ricky was going to turn him into Hammond Eggs.
Ricky was beginning to walk with a shuffle and a slight stoop. The elastic in his suspenders had long since rotted and until his new pair came in the mail from Temu, he was forced to manually pull his jeans up once they had dropped below his buttocks.
Today, they were both taking a ride into town for some light grocery shopping and to visit a friend at a memory care facility.
“I’ll go warm the Studebaker up, Venice,” he said as he slipped on his fall jacket and walked out the back door.
The two, ever curious alpacas stood at the fence line and watched as he shuffled up the sidewalk toward the garage. Their three identical hairstyles ruffled in the morning breeze.
“Splat!”
One of the alpacas hucked a mouthful of spit at his head. He turned to look at the animal.
“You’re going to have to do better than that, flop top.” he muttered with a grin on his face. “You’re a lousy aim.”
“Splat!”
A wad of saliva from the second animal dripped off his right earlobe.
“Dang it!” he swore, and he pulled out his handkerchief.
Venice was well rounded in every aspect of ranching life, which included sewing. Coming out the back door, Venice was followed by Hammond who this morning was wearing a pleated skirt with a floral design. He followed her up to the car and she opened the back door.
“Not the pig, Venice,” Ricky moaned.
“I see cats and dogs wandering the halls at memory care. Hammond wants to meet the residents.”
Venice climbed into the front seat and slid in her CD of Kenny Rogers and the New Christy Minstrels. Ricky fired up the Studebaker and through the blue exhaust smoke, backed out of the driveway.
It must have caused double-takes from those they drove past to see a large pig hanging its head out the back seat side window, and what looked to be an alpaca driving the car.
At the grocery store, while Venice was looking for canned goods, Ricky went back behind the produce section and grabbed an armful of rotting vegetables which he carried outside and tossed through the open window into the back seat.
“Enjoy, bacon bits,” he said smiling at Hammond.
The next stop was a short drive to the memory care facility. They parked and Venice opened the back door for Hammond.
“He looks divine in his pleated skirt. Why did you put a skirt on a boar, Venice?”
“It was too difficult getting him into his pants this morning. Come along Hammond. You too, Ricky.” And the pig in the skirt and the man, showing way too much underwear, followed her into the building.
Hammond was a crowd pleaser and easily entertained a room full of ladies having noon time tea and cookies.
Ricky and Venice went to the room of their acquaintance and sat with her for a while. Although Venice was able to communicate with the woman, Ricky couldn’t and soon became bored.
“I’m going down to get some coffee, Venice. I’ll bring you back a cup.”
He got up and shuffling down the hall with his slightly stooped posture, he headed in the direction of the dining room. As he neared the entrance, he felt an arm drape over his shoulder.
“Hello, you’re new here. I’m Nurse Jenny. Are you coming to the birthday party?”
Ricky stared angrily into her face and stood up a little straighter.
“I don’t live here,” he said.
“This is your home now. It’s all right. Let me find you a seat at the birthday party.” And she walked him into the festivities in the dining room.
“Venice!” he yelled.
An hour later, Venice walked down the hallway to look for her husband and her cup of coffee. Passing by the dining room, she looked through the double doors to see Ricky sitting at a table with three men. He was wearing a party hat and Hammond lay at his feet.
“It’s about time, Venice. We were about to play Pin The Tail on the Pig.”
They all waved as Ricky and the pig left the room.
As they drove up the driveway to their garage, the old Studebaker backfired leaving a cloud of blue smoke. Hammond, with his head hanging from the backseat window, let out a loud squeal as if to say, “We’re home mop tops.”
“I heard that porkchop,” said Ricky, who was more than just a little irritated.
Venice stepped from her car door and opened the back door for Hammond. Together they walked single file down the sidewalk past the two alpacas and entered the house.
“Huh,” Ricky muttered. “Nothing.”
He started down the sidewalk to the back door.
“Splat, splat.”
“Dang it!” he swore. Pulling out his handkerchief, he wiped the dripping alpaca spit off the side of his head.
I never wanted a horse. To the best of my knowledge, my mom, my brother and my sister never made mention of wanting one either, and yet we had a horse. He was an American Pony and his name was Starfire.
I walked through the automatic sliding doors and into the main entrance of Billy’s, a small family-owned grocery store in Cataula, Georgia. The checker closest to the door looked up at me as I entered, and she stared. She was a young lady in her early 20’s. I could not help but notice that not only did she continue to stare, but she also started to follow close behind me.
“Where would your cold medicines be located,” I asked her.
“Um,” she said. “Right there on aisle three.”
She pointed and continued to follow on my tail.
What is the problem, I wondered? Has she never seen a man from the Pacific Northwest? Don’t people down here wear blue Jean cutoffs with wool socks and Birkenstock sandals?
I turned around to see her following no more than three feet away. She appeared to be fixated on the black hat on my head.
Cicadas, perhaps if you’re from the west coast you’ve heard of them but never seen one. They are interesting insects in that they live under the ground as nymphs for most of their lives, only to surface above ground to mate. My wife and I were visiting Cataula in the spring of 2024, a jackpot year for Cicadas. I say jackpot in the same sense as being at San Juan Capistrano when the swallows arrive from Argentina, or at the Nature Conservancy in Santa Barbara when 33,000 Monarch butterflies congregate.
We just happened to be at the exact spot where Cicada brood XIX popped their heads up out of the ground. It was like being in the right spot, at the right time, for a total eclipse of the sun, the blood moon, and the asteroid Apophis hitting the earth.
After 13 years underground as nymphs, the cicadas were emerging, coming forth from the ground like zombies in a horror movie. Millions of cicadas climbing onto trees and on buildings, shedding their old skins to reveal winged adults. It is estimated that there are approximately one million cicadas in the ground per acre, so in the state of Georgia alone there are roughly two trillion, four hundred eleven billion, seven hundred forty million coming to the surface.
The male cicadas serenade the females with their loud calls during the daylight hours, leading to mating and egg-laying. Once hatched, the nymphs return underground to feed on tree roots until the 13-year cycle repeats. Meanwhile, the adults, like salmon, mate and fall over dead leaving a massive mess on the ground surface to clean up. They have no predators except copper mouth snakes which find them to be tasty treats. Land owners have a choice of raking up the cicadas or having a yard full of pit vipers.
For those of you from the northwest, who have never been to the southeast side of the US and experienced the strange sound of a cicada, it is something as foreign to us as our Sasquatch screams would be to a southerner.
My wife and I were picked up from the airport in Atlanta and driven to my daughter’s home in Cataula. As we got out of my daughter’s car at her home it was late afternoon. What hit me first was the high humidity on the 80-degree day. What I noticed next was the sound.
It sounded like the neighborhood was underneath an enormous flying saucer which had a bad engine bearing. I looked to the sky around the neighborhood, but it was impossible to pinpoint the origin of the sound.
“What is that noise,” I asked. “Crickets, frogs, some type of farm machinery?”
“Those are Cicadas,” my daughter Kalene said.
I stood by the car in awe listening to the sound. It was very much like seeing the Aurora Borealis for the first time. Very captivating.
Cicadas recorded from my daughter’s house.
And then I noticed them flying by, their wings humming, not like a bee, but more like a dragon fly or a large moth because these are very large insects with inch long black bodies, red eyes, and clear, orange-tinted wings.
“Wow, they are everywhere,” I said. “Flying through the air and dead on the ground like a swarm of locusts.”
And so, in my life journal I now have a notation which says: May 2024, experienced Cicadas!
Walking to the display of seasonal allergy medicines, I stopped and scanned the shelf for Benadryl. I did not realize that the young checker was inches away. As I bent down to grab a box off the shelf, I felt her strike. It was a good clean blow to the top of my head.
I stood up, pulling my hat off my eyes.
“What the heck?” I yelled.
“Oh, I almost got it,” she moaned.
I heard the drone of wings and the cicada which was on my hat, flew around and landed on my nose and we stared at each other, red eyes to blue.
Startled, I picked the big bug off by his body and held it in my fingers. The checker held out her hand, palm up for me to deposit the bug but I could see that she wasn’t excited to hold it.
“I tell you what,” I said in a calmer voice, “I’ll take it outside for you.”
I have since added to my journal: May 2024, experienced Cicadas, and customer service at Billy’s Grocery Store.
It is estimated that Australia has over 24 million wild pigs. I was on a photo Safari in Queensland to capture on film the King Kong of feral hogs. The locals call him Jambi.
Jambi weighs over 1000 pounds and is well over nine feet long. He has a harem of 45 sows and multiple piglets. Wherever they move, they create mass destruction of the land and many a domestic animal, even humans disappear when Jambi is in the area.
From the top of a tree, we clung to the remaining trunk which we could wrap our hands around.
Standing on branches below us which strained under our weight, we looked out over the forest treetops. We were at the same height as the giants. We were one of them.
Beak and Bill sat on the end of a dock at Lake Padden. The morning was cool, and a light fog drifted across the surface of the water.
The two met every morning during fishing season and sometimes out of season. It was not only a place to catch fish and banter the latest gossip, but it was also a place to sit quietly to let one’s mind drift before the busyness of the day began.
I met a man sitting on a sidewalk bench in Lynden the other day. He had a heavy Chicago Bears sweatshirt on, and it was obvious to me that he wasn’t a local.
I had a nudge from my inner self to say “hi”. He was a nice guy, but it was hard for me to understand the inner city slang he was using. Basically, I understood that he was in the county visiting a brother who had moved out from Chicago. The brother was encouraging him to move out before he got shot in the streets.
Iris and Lincoln Stodge live at 1835 Fernhook Lane, a very long drive through fields of corn which ends at the base of the Whatcom Timber Reserve. Iris and Lincoln are fourth and fifth graders.
To tell you the truth, it wasn’t until my late 20s that I learned the word hierarchy and the medical term pes cavus weren’t the same thing. I should never trust the images in my mind.
Ricky Dandelion and his wife, Venice lived not far outside the city limits of Bellingham. Along with their house, barn, and out-buildings, they owned eight acres of fenced pastureland on which they grazed cattle — six cows and a bull.
Listen my children and you shall hear of the afternoon ride of Bucky the Deer. Do not turn aside and say, “Grampa is aged,” for I’ve heard that enough from my Progressive agent. Think of this tale and the facts thereof, as a warning to the perils of being in love. . .
After the embarrassing little roof incident where Taylor got a good chewing out by Nel and Greg got a black eye, it was decided that they would take Jason’s advice and seek out his friend Jen for proper training in rope rappelling. This was done without Nel’s knowledge.
It was a hot, dry summer day and Taylor was sitting in his Adirondack chair in the shade of the east side of the store. It was his second break of the day, and his wife Nel was inside helping customers. In his hand he held a can of Cola, and another sat in a cooler by his feet. As usual at this time of day, he heard the crunching of feet on gravel walking his way. He lifted the bill on his Ranger cap and looked up the road.
