D is for Delirious

Forty years ago, I met my husband at Oviedo High School. Yes. We were high school sweethearts. Odds for our continued success were not good. We were young. We were goofy. We were hardly qualified to drive an automobile let alone make a life together.

We did . . .

. . . make a life together.

We’re stubborn that way.

This Christmas, my high school sweetheart decided he would gift me several new dresses. He’s done that in the past, bought me clothes that I loved, and that I wore until they rotted off my body. There was one little number, a little navy-blue sailor dress that I rocked for years . . . This Christmas was a blast from the past—in more ways than one.

I opened my gifts and pulled out three lovely fitted dresses.

Size? High school prom.

“Sweetheart,” I began, “they’re quite nice.” I held up one emerald green shift to my grandmotherly body. It covered one shoulder and a chunk of love handle. “But . . . I can’t wear it.”

“What? Why?”

“Because there’s not enough of it.”

He pulled the dress out of my hands and frowned at the fabric he held. “But these are the kind of dresses you always like to wear.”

I rejected telling him that I haven’t worn a dress like this in twenty years. I counted the darts, contemplated the narrow, nipped-in waistline, and noted the lack of stretch in the overall design. I checked the tag in the neck: size, teenager.

“Babe, Zoe might be able to wear them.” Zoe is our fifteen-year-old granddaughter.

He looked genuinely puzzled. “Really?”

“Really. Really.”

Sighing, I ran my hand over my unwearable Christmas gifts.

Zoe wore one of them to church just the other Sunday. She looked like a rockstar stock broker. The emerald green dress fit like a well sewn glove.

My grown children told her how great she looked, how grown-up, how slick and professional.

My son looked at me and said, “Hey, isn’t that one of the dresses Dad bought for you for . . .”

“Yes.” I nodded.

“Zoe,” he continued, “What size do you wear?”

“Zero,” she said.

My son turned back to me and said, “Wow!”

He called it. Wow. I’m married to a man that either is so deliriously still in love with me that he only sees the girl with the twenty-three-inch waist and the cute “Sweet Honesty” t-shirt, or he hasn’t actually looked at me in twenty years.

I’m going with delirious.

Linda (Sweetly Honest) Zern

C is for Cacophony

We live on a hobby farm. That’s a farm that doesn’t seriously try to make money or make any attempt to apply for government farm subsidies. Money goes in but it never comes out. It’s like owning a boat, but with goats.

The countryside of Central Florida, where we hobby farm, has its own special sounds and smells. I like to call it the cacophonous order of freedom. We live outside the city limits, limits being the optimal word. We live in the county where the rules are different, options abound, and the sound of gunfire is frequent and non-threatening.

“Why is the dog hiding under the dinner table?” I ask.

“The neighbors,” a grand boy replies, “they’re shooting at stuff.”

Everyone tilts their head—some to the right, some to left—to listen. Sure enough, the sound of blam, blam, blam drifts through the dining room windows.

“Ahhhh . . . target practice.” It’s a consensus.

The smell of smoke accents the sound of gunfire. We all breathe deeply. “Ahhhh . . . Mr. Medina is burning stuff,” I observe.

Sandhill cranes bang out their hollow drum call as they sail across the sky. In the cow pasture behind us, coyotes send up their primal howling. A lone cow, possibly in labor, bawls out her distress. The air boat guy two properties down, fires up his airboat, sending a bratty, screechy whine spewing across the neighborhood.

Children yell and shout and yip from the “talking tree.”

By the by, the talking tree is not a tree that talks, it is a tree where you go to sit and talk to your buddies, thus, the talking tree.

Our dog barks at something only she can see or hear or smell.

The wind sets the leaves to trembling and skittering in the golden light of a dying sun.

The sounds of sirens and traffic are intermittent at best and act as a counterpoint to all the rest—the cacophony of the countryside where we live.

But now that I think of it, isn’t a cacophony a discordant collection of jarring noises?

Answer: Yes!

So, I’m going to change my word. It’s not a cacophony at all.

The sound of air rattling past Maple leaves and rushing through Spanish moss mixed with the perfume of smoke and colored with the shrieks of laughing kids and the bleating talk-talk between mother goats and their babies isn’t a cacophony at all.

It’s music.

Linda (All Ears) Zern

B is for Bask

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B is for Bask

When we bought our house in Central Florida, the former home owner handed me a long, slender strip of wood with a bent coat hanger hook stapled at one end.

He said, “This is your snake stick. You’re going to need it.” With that, he and his lovely wife climbed into their RV and roared off into the Florida sunset. The snake stick is designed to humanely lift cold-blooded snakes off the handle of the garbage can—a handle that a human might be about to grab with his/her bare, warm-blooded hand.

I didn’t even get a chance to thank him for my new snake stick.

And I should have. Thanked him. Black snakes patrol the foundation of our home like North Korean soldiers looking for random American tourists or Christian hikers. They bask—to expose oneself pleasantly to warmth—in the sun on my walkways. They drape—to fall or hang in loose folds—themselves in the branches of my hedges. They shed—to fall off—their skins among my sunflowers.

They make me wet—tinkling urine out of fear—in my pants.

Not that I’m anti-snake. I’m not. But dang, is there an animal on the face of the earth better at the “gotcha game” than the cold-blooded snake? I think not.

How many snakes, you ask? Approximately twelve dozen or one really busy one. I’m not sure.

What do they want, you may wonder? Lizards.

Florida is awash with creepy, crawly types, and I don’t just mean the massage parlor boys. Lizards dart, whip, creep, flick, and crawl all over the screens of our porch. Our snakes have developed an interesting lizard hunting technique. They slither along the base of the porch and then leap straight up to pluck distracted lizards off the porch screen. True story. I’ve seen it. Our snakes can leap—about as high as a couple of chubby toddlers stacked one on top of another.

Snake stick? You bet. I carry it with me when I stroll through the pasture or feed the chickens or breathe fresh air. I worry that the snakes will mistake me for a porch screen covered in lizards. It might not be a rational concern, but it is real.

Today, I smacked a lizard off the back-porch screen, sending it flying into the yard. It hit the ground, gained its feet, and blazed its way back to the safety of the porch screen. A wily black snake gobbled the lizard up inches from safety, and now I’m going to have to continue to feed the foundation snakes or they’ll break into the house and punish us. I know it.

It’s not a rational worry, but it is real.

Linda (Snake Skin) Zern