Six Acres and a Mule

The problem with public parks? The “public” has no say.

People who sit behind desks can shut public parks down, lock them up, and patrol them with low flying, whirling knife-bladed, spy drones. And a person can shake their grubby little fist at the sky only to have their picture taken and then placed on the wall of the un-desirables and trouble mongers who violate parks.

You cannot touch the king’s grass or swing on the queen’s swing set, or feed the royal ducks.

The answer? Everyone should own a big-a$$ed park, just like the Obamas in Martha’s Vineyard. Big cities, zero lot lines, sewage shooting past your head in the apartment wall next to your face cannot be good for human animals, in my opinion. Better to roam open spaces and breathe big air.

So, that’s my proposal. A park for everyone.

Give me a park or give me death. Six acres of park and a mule.

We have a park, of sorts, but no mule. It’s six acres and a back-breaking amount of work, but our park is open.

Activities include: Fence building under the blinding, sterilizing Florida sunshine, social distancing easily enforced; animal poop moving, equipment provided; spent bullet digging in the sandhill on the shooting range, keep what you find; branch, log, and stick dragging, cardio and strength building guaranteed.

My husband often sits in the glow of a gently setting sun, sighs, and talks of life in a condo. I hush him and send him out to feed the chickens.

He once tried to get me to sell everything, travel the world with him, and live in Marriot hotels.

Stunned, I said, “Do you know how fast I’d be out pulling weeds in their tasteful landscaping?”

“You could live on room service,” he countered.

“But I need dirt.” I smiled around the grit of sand in my teeth.

“I know,” he sighed.

My son-in-law once described hobby farming. “Farming is buying animals that poop and then moving the poop around.”

My response? “What’s your point?”

Parks are a lot of work. It’s true. But it’s good honest, back-to-nature (real nature, not that crazy Disney crap that makes people think ducks wear pants or don’t eat the entrails out of other animals) work.

Dirt . . . it does a body good.

Dirt for everyone.

Linda (Digger) Zern

How America Went Soft

In the middle of a once in a lifetime (from my lips to God’s ear) viral pandemic, my dryer tried to kill itself.

As I scooped dog food out of the 600 lb. bag of dog kibble (I believe in being prepared) I noticed my left cheek burning with the heat of a thousand suns. The heat was radiating out from the side of my stacked dryer.

“That ain’t right,” I whispered to no one. “Sherwood!” I howled. “The dryer is trying to burn the house down!!”

We turned the dryer off. “That’ll fix it,” we said. And it did. Of course the heap of slowly souring laundry cried out for relief, and that’s when I re-discovered the clothesline, clothes pins, and the sweet smell of line-dried clothes.

Things I’ve discovered from hanging laundry after a fifty year hiatus.

1.)   The sky. The wind. The weather. Hanging clothes on a line will put you back in touch with real, unconditioned air. I am one with the elements.

2.)   The smell is beyond science to replicate. I don’t care what chemically treated product you toss into that electric clothes shrinker, outside has a smell all its own: clean, fresh, light, pure.

3.)   My clothes, hanging all in a line, is a task that satisfies my need to work and do and accomplish. I can see a pattern in my doing. It completes me.

4.)   FYI: I want to be wrapped in line-dried sheets upon my death and buried in the back pasture.

5.)   Towels dried in the sun become one part Brillo pad and one part sandpaper. Whatever germs are still creeping about on your body after washing with the highly scented, overly artificial soap of modern hygienic practices, a sun-dried towel will scrape those critters right off into the dustbin of history.

6.)   Americans got soft the day clothesline-dried towels became electric dryer fluffed cotton balls warmed in the belly of a fossil fuel sucking, fire breathing, lint burner.

7.)   Number six is just a theory.

I pull a wet sheet from the basket, clip it to the line, watch it flap gently in the breeze, and breathe deeply. It smells like my great-grandmother and the sun and the earth and the peace of quiet things done well.

The repairman will be here Monday. Sigh.

Linda (Fresh Scent) Zern

Shopping Buggy Blues: Buggy, Cart, Trolley

When the cashier asked me, “Did you find everything okay?”

I said, “Sure, yeah, great! I found the toilet seat, dog dip, fire ant killer, and gas can—just great. I would be beside myself with shopping joy IF IT WASN’T FOR YOUR DERANGED BUGGIES!”

Then she called security.

Here in the south we call them buggies. If you’re a Yankee you may call them carts, and if you’re from England, you call them trolleys—which is just bizarre.

There are three types of buggies at Walmart: the ones that pull—to the left or the right, the ones that vibrate like the Space Shuttle during liftoff, and the ones that seize up on you, because it suspects that you are homeless and looking for a spare bedroom.

I watched my husband yank, pull, push, sway, and rock a Walmart buggy for seventeen minutes one day when we crossed the invisible buggy alert line. It froze up. He went berserk.

“It’s frozen,” I said. He yanked.

“The buggy thinks that you’re homeless,” I explained. He tipped, then rocked, and then shook it--all over.

“Face it; we’re going to have to carry eighty pounds of groceries from here to way out there.” I pointed. It was hard to see our vehicle. It was Christmas time. He growled.

The vibrator buggies are often easy to spot. These buggies are often abandoned at various points around the mega-store, due to the hideous clank, clank, clank noise they emit, and the tremors that travel up through the one wheel that is flapping free. That clanking noise travels through the handle, into the bones of your forearm, and finally into your temples—like an ice pick.

Occasionally, a small child will also be abandoned with the buggy. It’s a decoy. Don’t fall for it. When you go to assist the child, its mother will attempt to steal your buggy and collect the kid later at the lost and found.

The pullers are the worst. Hard to spot and apparently impossible to fix these buggies appear serviceable, but by the time you reach the detergent you will be nearing a state of exhaustion. The exhaustion stems from the constant over compensating you will be forced to do to keep your buggy from drifting into the buggy with the infant in it on your left or the woman in the hover-round on your right.

Tip: The more groceries in a puller the worse it pulls, and if a puller buggy gets away from you in the parking lot there may be no stopping it. Like a suicide bomber it will throw itself into the nearest and newest car in the parking lot.

Chasing after a runaway cart, screaming, is highly ineffective. Trust me on this.

Then there are the perfect buggies. The ones that neither pull, nor drift, nor rattle, nor seize up. A pleasure to push and a joy to load up, these buggies just roll along like a corny song, until you hit a bump and your eggs fall out onto the parking lot, but don’t break, and they (the eggs) go rolling—but not in a straight line, because unbroken eggs can’t roll in a straight line—every where, they roll just every which way, and because the eggs didn’t break you feel that you should catch them, because they’re still good. Right?

I mean you could still make brownies with them (if you cooked that is) and so you go running wildly through the parking lot chasing eggs, trying to get all your eggs in one basket, but in the end there’s no way that you’re going to crawl underneath that van dripping bio-hazards where three of your eggs have rolled, because there are things that you’ll do for brownies and then there are things that you won’t do, and that’s life.

Sometimes life pulls to the right or left, leaving you exhausted and sometimes it vibrates and shatters your eardrums. Sometimes life locks up on you, thinking that you’re someone else entirely, and sometimes life is just right--then the eggs fall out and roll away under a van.

Linda (Trolley Girl) Zern