I'll Fly Away

On Thursday I went to the funeral of a man I have known for over 20 years.  We knew each other professionally.  We weren't close but after being in hundreds of meetings with the same person over the years, you get to know a person.  I liked him.  He was interesting.  He was professional.  He was jolly.  He had a way of making people feel important.  We were both fans of Greg Brown, the folksinger, and sometimes we'd see each at concerts.  This man also was a musician. He wrote songs for his coworkers when they left or had an important birthday.   I attended his retirement party last April and I received a recording of the songs he had written.  I am so sad that he enjoyed less than a year of retirement before he died.  This is one of the songs they played at the funeral and it's been stuck in my head ever since.  Listen to it.  It's a good song for a funeral I think.

Peanut Butter Kisses

Today someone left peanut butter kisses on the break room table at work.  You know peanut butter kisses?  They are the wrapped peanut butter flavored taffy wrapped in black and orange waxed paper?  The kisses wrapped in orange paper taste the best.  I took a peanut butter kiss for myself and remembered back to a job where I got a peanut butter kiss every day.  I worked as a nurses aid when I was in college.  The nursing home backed up to some woods that led to the St. Cloud penitentiary and that made for exciting walks to our cars when we heard a convict had escaped.  One of the patients there was a woman who was younger than the other residents.  I think her first initial was T.  T had physical challenges in her middle age that made it impossible for her to live at home.  Her husband's name was Jerry.  Jerry came to visit his wife every night after work.  He stayed all evening.  He ate meals with his wife and sometimes their children and grandchildren came to the nursing home too. When I first started there, Jerry would offer me a piece of candy from a bowl with many kinds of candy.  He learned my name and he learned my candy choice; peanut butter kisses.  Every night Jerry would find me and give me a peanut butter kiss. If I wasn't working on T's wing, he would come and find me.  Looking back, I see now I took Jerry for granted.  Never have I had another job where I got a piece of candy every day I worked.  Seldom have I met a man so kind, so cheerful, and so devoted to his wife.  Jerry took lemons and made them into lemonade. I was just a kid back in those days when Jerry gave me peanut butter kisses.  I had no idea how great of a guy he really was.  So today, as I chewed my peanut butter kiss, I thought of Jerry and finally realized how lucky I was to have known him.

Gurneys Keeps Me Warm On Long Winter Nights

Everything looks so great in the Gurney's seed catalog.  The cabbages are huge.  The carrots orange and slender.  The sunflowers are 12 feet tall.  The pumpkins, the beets, the squash, the peas in the pod, the potatoes, the angel trumpet vines, the black eyes susans, the hardy lavender, and the ostrich plume ferns - they all look fantastic.  Will my garden compare to these photographically enhanced beauties?  No, of course not.  But that doesn't stop me from dreaming and planning and scheming and imagining.  I think the value of the Gurney's catalog is in the imagining.  Imagining being able to dig in the dirt and smell the richness in your hands as you squeeze the soil aside to make room for the tiny seeds that will, one day, grow up to be a 12 foot tall sunflower.  Imagining that the deer will not invade your garden and nip off every sunflower plant when they're about a foot tall.  Imagining the taste of that first tomato as you pop it into your mouth and the seeds burst against the back of your teeth.  Imagine warm sunshine, birds singing, puffy white clouds forming shapes in the sky, and the sore hamstrings you get from working in the garden all day.  I love my Gurney's catalog because it seeds imagination into my wintery brain. 

Top 10 Ways To Know You Got a Cold

10.  Your eyes water when you are not crying.
9.  You look forward to the feeling when the Nyquil starts to kick in.
8.  You bring out the "special" box of tissue (Puffs Plus).
7.  Dirty kleenex falls out of your sleeves when you take off your clothes to go to bed.
6.  Your normal 48 ounces of liquid that you finish by 11:30 a.m. are gone by 9 a.m.
5.  You lay one one side or another in bed depending on which nostril is more congested.
4.  You feel as though there is an extra three pounds of weight under your forehead.
3.  Your palate gets dry from breathing with your mouth open.
2.  The skin between your nose and mouth is a bright cherry color.
1. You feel like your upper molars are being sucked up toward your eyeballs when you blow your nose.

Not So Easy



This necklace is similar to one I admired in a catalog in November. 
I saw it, wanted it, and decided I didn't need it. 
Offspring #1 bought it for me for my birthday?  How did he know? 
I love it.



Last year I wrote a goal about listing the birds I saw for 2011: "I don't expect to see over 200 in Minnesota and maybe another fifty in the Galapagos Islands.  If I get to 250 by December, 2011, I will be very pleased." 

My total of birds seen by December, 2011 was 168.  And 168 was a lot of work and involved trips to New Mexico and the Galapagos Islands.  This year I am not aiming for a number but to continue to list the birds and appreciate the ones I am able to see.   My other goal is to live my life as if it could end soon.  I have lost some people near and dear to me this year.  No one knows what the future holds.  No more procrastinating on the good times for me.

A Snowy Walk

Snow fell on New Year's Eve. I went outside to explore the snow about 9 in the evening.  The flakes were huge and three dimensional.  Each flake was as large as a  tablespoon and melted onto my jacket.  No wind blew and the atmosphere was very quiet except for the splotchy flakes of snow falling.  I walked on the paths I have mowed through the front yard, into the woods to the east of the house, down the hill to the side street, up the hill past the compost pile, and along the southern property edge.  The Christmas lights my neighbors displayed were blurred and made prettier by the falling snow.  When I wanted to taste some clean snow, I didn't have to use my hands.  Each branch and twig held a convenient mouthful for me.  I checked on Meredith as I walked by.  She was cozy and warm on her fresh pile of wood shavings.  The snow, it deadens all sounds and wipes away all mistakes and imperfections, temporarily making our world fresh and clean.  Sometimes snow can be magical.

Project Feeder Watch

Red Bellied woodpecker-1, Hairy Woodpecker-1, Downy woodpecker-1, Junco=4, Goldfinch-6, Black capped chickadee-5, White breated nuthatch-1, Northern Cardinal-2, American Crows-2