JITTERY

Reports of my imagined death are false—also incorrect. I’m not dead.

To recap: I am not dead. I’m just concentrating really hard.

Several years ago, my husband couldn’t instantly get a hold of me via my cell phone, because it was dead, the cell phone. NOT ME. When he couldn’t immediately contact me from Kuala Lumpur or Detroit or Walmart or wherever to let me know he’d forgotten to take out the garbage or something equally informative, he panicked.

So he called our daughter, Heather.

Who called our daughter, Maren.

Who told her friends at school that I’m a hermit and a nut.

Who called my husband, her father.

Who called our daughter, Heather, again.

Who called each other, over and over, whipping each other into a frenzy.

Heather finally broke the cycle of hysteria by calling her friend, Maria, and saying, “I’m at work. Could you drive out to my parent’s house and check on my AGED mother?”

Maria! Marie who lives in a whole other village, Marie, who got in her car, drove to our country home (also our city home) and finding all the doors, window, and portholes open assumed that I had been eaten by cats—also raccoons.

I was in my office—working.

Proving that what we’ve got here is a hefty case of the jitters.

While it is true that I live alone a great deal of time, I am not a complete idiot. I try to wait for when my husband is home to clean the chimney, re-organize the hayloft, chop down trees, or check the crawlspace for expired squirrels.

And as far as being murdered in my sleep by criminal types, I believe that most criminal types are stupid people, the kind of people that get stuck in chimneys. And if I can’t outsmart some nimrod stuck in my chimney then shame on me.

That’s why I sleep with the cat. Plan A is that I will throw the cat at the stupid intruder and make my escape out of the bathroom window. At which point I will run to the ditch out front and hide behind the enormous stump that the county hasn’t carted away from storm damage. It’s the main reason I haven’t called the county about the eyesore stump by the road. That stump is part of my master plan. I have a detailed schematic drawn up.

Please note: That stump has been hauled off since I first reported on the above foolishness, thus changing plan A to plan B.

Unfortunately, plan B has me hiding in my neighbor’s barn in my *scanties. So sometimes I sleep in my bathrobe with my cell phone in the pocket, except that my cell phone is quite often “dead,” thus kicking off jittery meltdowns in the first place. Go figure.

Linda (Chimney Sweep) Zern

*Scanties is a southern word for clothing you don’t want to be caught wearing while hiding in a ditch.

A BIG, BIG THANK YOU . . .

. . . to my readers for their kind words and helpful feedback.  

A Wrinkle in Time

I was forty-six at the time. I needed a haircut. I walked into one of those cut rate chop shops for hair and asked in a youthful, jolly way, “I just walked in for a haircut. Who wants to welcome me?”

The receptionist gave me her best and most practiced smile. She looked twelve.

I flipped my scraggly hair out of my eyes in a hip, child-like way.

“And will you be wanting the fifty-five and over discount?” she said, her hand hovering over the appointment book.

Stunned, shocked, dismayed, and startled, I said, “No, no discount! And I’m not pregnant either.”

There it was, my first brush with death, the dreaded senior citizen’s discount inquiry.

I was forty-six. But some of my wrinkles were ninety.

I blame Botox. It’s hard to find a forehead that isn’t lying about its age. So, in the spirit of honesty and full disclosure I make an accounting of my wrinkles and how they came to roost on my face.

Please note: I have a very expressive face. My face expresses itself a lot. If I paralyzed my wrinkles my mouth would turn to stone, not unlike my heart.

To begin there are four parallel lines across my forehead. They look like wrinkle canyons. These are my shock and awe lines. As in, “What made you think that lowering the cat out of the second story window in a pillowcase was a good idea? Pull that cat back in this window right now.” Or, “Your brother put peanut butter where? Show me.”

These wrinkles are also my “Ask a stupid question wrinkles.” They appeared after having to ask questions like, “Is that Barbie doll smoking a cigarette?” Or better yet, “Please tell me that you are not making Barbie porn with the family video camera?”

Then there is the single SLASHING wrinkle across the very top of my forehead known as the mark of the oldest child. This line appeared the day I found our oldest son dangling upside down by one foot from his grandfather’s motor home. Typing a rope to the railing of the RV, he’d attempted to go “rappelling.” The RV was the tallest thing he could find in Florida. Now, he dangles out of helicopters for the US military. The wrinkle deepens.

The nest of crosshatched lines around my eyes was created by having to watch 1,247 games of Little League baseball without sunglasses in the Sun Shine State.

The marionette lines around my mouth are inherited. I got them from my mother, who got them from her mother, who got them from . . . It’s hard to argue with genetic baggage.

The wrinkles on my cheeks are my very own. They’re dimple wrinkles, and they’re from laughing. They’re from hearing my husband (at public swimming facilities) say things like, “Quick, everyone run for the car, the baby just pooped in the hot tube.” And then running, and then finding out nobody pooped in anything.

Actually, that’s the problem. I don’t have a heart of stone.

Like you, I feel everything, and everything I feel comes pounding out of my heart, surges through the pores of my face, and drips right off the end of my deeply lined chin. It seems odd that the goal of our society is to make our faces look as if they’ve never felt anything or been anywhere.

My face was forty-six years old, and it had seen some stuff.

My face is older now and it has seen a lot more stuff.

And it’s a good face—wrinkles and all.

Linda (Discount Diva) Zern