A Comic Interlude

Or is it comical? Who the hell cares, anyway. The play must and does go on, despite my wranglings and tears. At least we don't live in Buffalo where I heard they got more snow in a couple of days than they expected for the entire year.That's some holy shit muttering right there, if not explaining. I wonder how many climate change deniers live up in old Buff A Lo.

Anyhoo.

Out in the garden today, Oliver was rummaging around the vegetables that are growing like crazy in our one raised bed. We've got lettuce up the wazoo, chard and mint and broccoli and cauliflower and since the sun always shines, and our water restrictions are restricted to grass, the vegetables are way too numerous for our little carbohydrate loving family to consume. Oliver, being the entrepreneur, has ideas to pick, wash and sell for drastically low prices and when I gave him the ok, he set to it. Very quickly he shouted for me to come outside to see all the mushrooms growing under the lettuce and throughout the bed. It's so gross, Mom! he said. Look at how the black stuff is sticking to the bottoms of the leaves! And I, city girl extraordinaire, bent over and looked and sure enough saw a hell of a lot of what I'd call fungus, and like they say, that ain't right. And then like the city girl extraordinaire that I am, I protested Oliver's easy picking up handfuls of the stuff and throwing it into the dirt. Isn't that going to spread the spores? I asked him and then I remembered that I'm the parent, so I told him to stop picking it, to wait until Your Father can check it out, and in the meantime go inside and really wash your hands with hot soap and water. Again, being the city girl extraordinaire, I also told him to rinse it off with the garden hose before you go inside, visions of spores traveling throughout our home, perhaps giving Sophie added insult to her already stressed brain (even more stressed by the recent wean of her Bad Benzo). Oliver obeyed me and went straight to the bathroom. I fiddled around with the papers on my bed and desk, left there earlier when it all got to be too much.

Suddenly, Oliver shouted out, MOM! The mushrooms are doing something to my hands! and my heart sunk or seized in anticipation of skin being flayed or deadly mushroom plague or whatever the hell happens with fungus, and in the same moment I ran to the hallway and Oliver ran out of the bathroom, holding his arms up high, coated with white stuff and I gasped and he burst out laughing and said that I had the most terrified look on my face that he'd ever seen.

Then I beat him halfway to Sunday, went outside, collected the mushrooms, fried them up in some butter, sprinkled them with some sea salt and served them for dinner.

A City Girl and a Squirrel and UPDATE

UPDATE: The squirrel has disappeared. Oliver noted that it was there one minute and gone the next, so we're hoping it recovered from the fall and scampered off to join its brethren.



That thar is a baby squirrel that might have fallen out of a tree that I nearly backed over but noticed as I walked to my car. I didn't scream out loud, but I screamed in my mind. In case you didn't know this about me, I'm a city girl. In fact, many moons ago, I had a roommate during my sophomore year in college who was a sweet, sweet young woman from Beulahville, North Carolina. Despite the fact that she had a Jesus is Lord Carolina blue frisbee pinned to her side of the room and I was the type gal who sometimes slept the night out, she never judged me nor tried to save me, and we became great friends. One weekend, she invited me to her home in Beulahville, and since I was dying to go to such a bucolic-sounding place and knew that I'd eat delicious food, I accepted. Her daddy was a turkey farmer -- he didn't have turkeys out in the dirt, pecking around (or is that chickens) but rather housed them in several vast football field sized barns. When you stepped inside, the din was outrageous. I think some people even wore earphones. There might have been millions of turkeys crowded in this giant barn, and the feathers were flying, the stench was outrageous, and I believe I raised my hands up to my ears and stood there stupefied. This was so many moons ago that I don't think we had expressions like organic farming or free-range, so when I stepped into those barns with my hands over my ears, a bit green at the edges, my roommate's daddy just hooted and hollered at me. He had the thickest of North Carolina accents and was as sweet as sugar on a stick, as my Alabama friend Sybil used to say, and later that day when he fiddled with his radio, he screamed at me, How'd ya like to get on my ham radio, city girl? 

Anywho.

That squirrel.

After screaming in my mind, I noticed that it was still moving so I ran inside and got Saint Mirtha who not only watches Sophie most Saturdays but is good in a pinch for things like taking a brown paper bag and scooping up a baby squirrel. I disappeared in my sexy Mazda and went to Trader Joe's, but not before posting that photo on Facebook with a request for advice on what to do. I got a bushel o' advice, my favorites being get it the hell outside from a friend in Nashville who apparently doesn't know me that well and thought I had brought the thing in my house, and Here in Texas they'd just throw him in the stew from a southern friend who always makes me laugh. Mostly people were helpful and suggested that I call wildlife rescue, and a few people kindly sent me websites that detailed How to Care for a Baby Squirrel, and when I opened up those links, I screamed again in my mind and immediately felt bad that I'm really not as good of a person as I might seem because, really, the last thing I want to do is nurse a baby squirrel back to life, even if it is dying a slow death on a bag on my front lawn.

Where, where are the coyotes that come down out of the Hollywood hills and kill small dogs?***







***I can't even imagine what Anonymous thinks of me now.