Leigh Ann Northcutt

Archive For: My Personal Pandemonium

The Tales of a Virtuous Woman Wannabe (Part 2) To Cook or Not To Cook? That Is a Stupid Question

As a Virtuous Woman Wannabe (see part 1 of this series), it was obvious that, at some point, I would need to turn my domestic efforts to the art of cooking, to don an apron that declares, “Queen of the Kitchen”, raise my yet-to-be-used Paula Deen wire whisk to the sky and reign with culinary skill in the kingdom of my kitchen.

To date, that time has not come.

The problem with cooking is that no matter how much time and effort I put into making a meal for my family, the next day, they want me to do it again. It is like a scene from the movie, Groundhog Day.

Every morning, I awake to wonder what I will cook that night. I open the door of the refrigerator freezer and stand there in a stupor. I stare at the multitude of vacuum packed pouches and prepackaged boxes and frozen bags crammed into every crevice of the space and I moan, “We have nothing to eat.”

Then I begin asking myself the question that will clog up my thoughts for the rest of the day. “What are we gonna have for supper tonight?”

In the morning, I think maybe we could have leftovers from another meal. Then I remember that we have had leftovers for the last several nights. (My family gets a bit riotous if they aren’t served a new meal every four to five days. In those instances, I lock up the knives and forks, for the sake of my safety, and declare the table to be a spoons only dining zone.)

At noon, I check on my husband’s lunch plans. My hope is that he will get away from the stress of his job and meet a friend for pleasant conversation and a good meal . . . because considering her husband’s peace of mind is what a Virtuous Woman does. If he eats a big lunch, I will serve a small supper . . . because monitoring her husband’s calorie intake is what a Virtuous Woman does.

Hallelujah, if he eats out! We will have frozen pizza and carrot sticks for supper. If he comes home for a sandwich at lunch, I keep working on supper plans and tell him I am glad he chose to eat lunch with me . . . because, sometimes, little, white lying to her husband is what a Virtuous Woman does.

In the middle of the afternoon, I get serious about the meal and run through my list of stock recipes. For one reason or another, I reject them all. Too many calories. Too many ingredients I don’t have. Too many “yucks” from my family. Just too dang much trouble.

Sometime after that, I make a decision, run to the grocery and cook a meal for my family. And then the next morning, much like the clock in Groundhog Day that clicks over to relive the same day, I find myself staring into the freezer and moaning, “We have nothing to eat!”

I have not always been this disinterested in preparing meals for my family. When I was young and idealistic, I fully intended to become a great cook. I meant to spend Sundays frying chicken in my best church dress with my sleeves rolled up so I could knead my hands into a mound of bread dough while the meringue of a chocolate pie browned in the oven behind me.

But that was then. That was when I didn’t know. That was when I did not know sooo many things.

I didn’t know that a woman has to have the forearm muscles of Popeye to knead a loaf of bread.

I didn’t know that making meringue requires six hands . . . four to handle the egg whites and two to lift in a fervent prayer for stiff peaks.

I didn’t know that frying a chicken would take a full two days out of my week . . . three hours and a pair of long nose pliers to pull the skin off the chicken, one hour to cook the meat until it is done, and a day and a half to clean the grease off the top of my stove, the corners of my ceiling, the surface of my floor and the bodice of my best church dress.

I didn’t know that becoming a good cook requires close attention to the task. Daydreaming will burn the biscuits more often than not. Reading while cooking will boil the water out the beans nine times out of ten. And adding one little “b” to a recipe will ruin the dish every single time. (It is surprising what replacing a tsp of salt with a tbsp will do to a chocolate pie.)

Over the years, from necessity and perseverance, I did become a cook. In fact, during the time when my sons were teenagers and I had all five of my kids eating at my table, I rarely left my kitchen. As soon as I had the kitchen cleaned after one meal, it was time to start cooking another one. I napped to the hum of the dishwasher, applied make-up by the reflection in my toaster and tanned by the light of the oven’s heating element.

I collected a set of recipes that met my requirements . . . less than six ingredients . . . that can all be found in the food aisle of Minit Mart . . . and prepared in one pot, pan or microwaveable bowl . . . in less than 15 minutes.

But, I never learned to enjoy the culinary process. I cooked because Social Services tends to show up if you starve your kids and we couldn’t afford to feed them any other way.

I suppose it is still possible that one day I will properly utilize my Paula Deen wire whisk and become a culinary Queen in my kitchen. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. I think it is more likely that I will shun my oven for the duration of my earthly days and hope the meal at Heaven’s banquet table is not potluck.

The Tales of a Virtuous Woman Wannabe: (Chapter 1) I Took Up Sewing and Learned to Cuss.

What can I say?

I was young. I was naive. I wanted to be like them.

And they sewed.

My first two years as a married woman, I worked during the day to put my husband through law school and then came home to face a list of housekeeping chores. Creative domesticity, during those years, meant crawling into my husband’s lap at the end of a work day and dramatizing the whine that begged him to take me out for supper. We were poor as the proverbial church mice. So, from the very beginning, my domestic attempts usually ended in my signature dish, Spaghetti a la Ragu.

However, when my husband graduated and took his first job, I threw mine to the wind and declared that I was ready to become The Virtuous Woman/Wife. At the time, we went to a church where most of the women had chosen to be full-time homemakers and stay-at-home mothers. To offset the lack of a second income, they had become masters of frugality and domestic arts.

On Sunday mornings, the pastor’s wife could thaw a chicken, cut it into pieces (no pre-packaged chicken parts for her) and fry it for lunch while she washed and hung clothes to dry on the outside line that she put up in her back yard and used regularly to save her family $100 a year in the cost of electricity . . . all before leaving for church to teach Sunday School.

I did well to find the time to shave my legs in the shower on Sunday morning.

I soooo wanted to be like her. I wanted to be like all of them. With those Wonder Women as my mentors, I was sure to become a Super-Virtuous-Woman with awesome, domestic powers.

I had been cooking for a couple of years by that time and my husband had neither died of food poisoning nor left me for his mother. So, I decided learning to sew would be my first step into the life of a Proverbs 31 Woman.

(If you are unfamiliar with that term, you can read Chapter 31 of Proverbs in your Bible or you can visit your local Christian bookstore where you will find two-thirds of the store dedicated to the subject. The other third will be split between Veggie Tale Videos, Duck Dynasty biographies and miscellaneous Christian paraphernalia.)

My friend, Laura, offered to teach me to sew. She said it would be easy. She said there was nothing to it. She said I would enjoy it.

She was wrong.

I was in over my head from the moment we walked into the fabric store.

We walked through the door that day and entered Laura’s place in the world. She stopped to take in the sights and sounds of the store, breathing deeply to inhale the scent of the various fabrics that filled the shelves and the perfume of the old ladies that infested the store.

I took a dumbfounded breath beside her. The endless bolts of cloth were overwhelming. I have never been good at making decisions. Day Lands! (An expression of dismay in the Northcutt family to be used in only the worst of situations.) We were going to be there all day!

It was then that I first heard Laura speak in tongues. At least, I assumed it was tongues. It just sounded like gibberish to me.

Eventually, I realized she was not using the kind of tongue language that Paul talks about in the Bible. Laura was speaking the unique language of the Proverbs 31 Virtuous Woman. With no one there to interpret, I was completely baffled.

“Something rayon . . . something, something chambray . . . something, something, something voile. What do you think? “

What did I think? Until that moment, I had thought chambray was a wine. I was pretty sure rayon would kill me. And voile? I still think Laura made up that word.

Evidently, my friend missed the signs of my confusion because she kept talking.

“Let’s just go with cotton . . . blah, blah . . . double cloth . . . blahdy-blah broadcloth. . . blah blah blah . . . chino or damask?”

Damask? Was that a question? Was that a question for me?! She was going to have to speak English or dam ask somebody else.

“Wah, wah, wah . . . something about a bias . . . yada, yada, yada . . . cut on a cross-grain . . . something, something . . . serge the selvage edges.”

At that moment, I prayed for the first time what was to become my theme prayer as a virtuous woman wannabe, “LORD, HELP ME!”

Laura continued, ” . . . and if you make a mistake you can darn the thing.”

That euphemistic foreshadowing should have caused me to run from the store and shuck the whole project. Instead, I loaded a shopping cart with the things Laura said I would need as I learned to sew. I bought fabric, patterns, threads, zippers, buttons and a small tool which was to become my best sewing friend . . . the seam ripper.

For the next few months, Laura patiently taught me to sew. It took six weeks to learn to thread the machine. It would have been easier to run electrical wiring through a nuclear power plant.

When I could thread the machine, I worked on sewing a straight line. Then I practiced sewing a straight line. Then I drilled myself on sewing a straight line. Then I Iied and said I could sew a straight line.

Laura didn’t like to waste time, so we did not begin by making potholders or hemming handkerchiefs. Having recently found out I was pregnant for the first time, Laura suggested I begin my sewing lessons with a simple maternity top. It had no button holes, no zippers, no sleeves and no shape. There were only a few steps. The pattern instructions could have been written on a Post-it note.

Laura said we should be able to finish it in a day.

Again, she was wrong.

It took significantly longer than a day. In fact, I think God may have had that shirt in mind when He made a woman’s gestation period last for nine months. I ripped out a seam every time I sewed one. There were so many holes in the fabric, it could have been used as mosquito netting.

After a few months of Laura’s coaching, I bought my own sewing machine and immediately went to war with it.

Having survived the battle of the maternity top, I moved on to skirmish with the machine over pillows and bedding for a crib. The machine drew first blood . . . literally. But I persevered and, in the end, the things held together and I put them in our baby bed.

(Since science had proven that newborns are basically blind, I hoped the bond between me and my child would be sealed and cemented before his vision developed and he could see that his mother was inept.)

By the time my son was two, I had become a competent seamstress, but I was far from becoming the Virtuous Woman I wanted to be. Without Laura by my side, I began to vocalize the hostility I felt toward the act of sewing.

It began with the occasional expletive that ran through my head while I fed the material through the machine. When I saw what came out on the other side, that one word became a four-letter mural in my mind. Eventually, my vexation became vocal. “Crap!”, which was perfectly acceptable in my home, stretched to “Crap, crap, crap, crap!” and then became the more questionable, “Crapfire!”

With the seeds of a potty mouth having been planted, a tentative “shhhhh . . . ” was soon slipping through my lips. In due time, the “t” found its way out of my mouth and I found myself “sht”ing more and more often as I sat at my sewing machine.

Then the day came when I totally lost control. I was tackling the most difficult and most impressive of my sewing projects. Having completed a shirt and jumpsuit for my son to wear to church, I was working on a dress I would wear. It was the cuffs on the sleeves that did me in.

As I put them on and took them off and put them on and took them off, I felt an “i” begin to roll around in my chest. When I put the first button hole in the wrong place, the vowel sound rose into my throat. I cut through the second button hole . . . and there it was! The fourth letter erupted from my mouth to join the other three and this Virtuous Woman Wannabe had learned to cuss.

At that point, I reassessed my first attempt at becoming a Proverbs 31 Woman. It seemed that learning to sew had been counterproductive.

So I gave it up. I quit sewing. Not because I hated every single second at the machine. Not because I loathed every stitch I had put in every garment. Not because my seam ripper had declared itself abused and overused and disappeared from my sewing box.

I stopped sewing, . . . burned my fabric, patterns, threads, zippers, and buttons, . . . and ran over my sewing machine with a dump truck . . . purely for my spiritual health. At least, that is what I told my husband.

I asked God if it was okay for a Virtuous Woman Wannabe to give up sewing. He said it was fine.

He had not been particularly shocked by my language.

But He also had not been impressed with the fruits of my sewing labors.

My Christmas Letter: Better Belated Than Never

Dear family, friends and blog readers,

This is my Christmas letter.

I doubt that the people on my Christmas card list are surprised by the timing. They would have to shuffle out of their shoes and make their toes available to count the number of times my Christmas cards have been late. I could make excuses, but I won’t. I have used most all of them in other Christmas letters.

I realize that some of you non-procrastinators have taken down your Christmas tree, boxed up your nativity set and put away your snowman dishes. But at my house Christmas goes on! (Pray as I may, it just won’t go away on its own!)

So, on a day when I should be taking down my seasonal decorations, I am, instead, writing my Christmas letter. Come to find out, I am a good way past caring that my cards are late. What can Santa do to me? Send a squadron of elves to reprimand my tardiness? Send them on; I can use them! I would love to grab them by their little, pointy ears and force them to pack up all my Christmas crap.

If I sound a bit scroogish, it is because I am Christmas tired. Some of you won’t understand that term. But those of you who are matriarchs; who, year after year, shop and clean and cook so you can serve Christmas to your families on holiday dishes that you wrapped with festive bows that you stuffed in matching stockings that you hung by the chimney with careless exhaustion know exactly what it means.

I most always begin January in a state of Christmas tired because Northcutts tend to Christmas party like no one else I know. I blame my husband. The man is a lawyer. Businesses rely on him. Our city officials don’t make a legal move without consulting him. He is considered to be the best adoption attorney in the western end of the state. But . . . (Lord, help us all) . . . he has the mind of child.

I do not mean to say that he has developed a new mental disorder. He has not. On the contrary, Greg continues to have the same Peter Pan, Never-Grow-Up, Drive-Me-Crazy mental condition he has had since he first pulled down his diaper and bared his behind to the adult world. He still goes to work in jeans. Odds are he will have a bit of sheep poo on his shoes when he walks through his office door. He still spends his free time playing with animals and pretending to be a farmer. Old-Time Scotch Collie dogs are his new interest. (You can see them on the The Northcutt Farm Facebook page.) He still has the loudest laugh in a movie theater.

But, now that Greg has a white beard and a roundish belly, he with the childlike mind, thinks he is Santa Claus. Around the first of November, he begins to let his beard grow, fluffing it out each morning with my hair brush. He puts red suspenders on his pants, old man reading glasses on his nose and reindeer antlers on his miniature horse. His days begin with Christmas carols on the piano and end with holiday movies on a DVD. By the time December arrives, he is spreading Christmas cheer for all to hear.

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This was a Christmas card picture that read, “Hope your Christmas is as much fun as a sack of puppies.”

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Greg and our oldest granddaughter, Bella

Another Christmas card picture from Greg’s law office . . . always an example of professionalism

He has taught me and all our children to suck every bit of celebration from the season. As a result, the Spirit of Christmas overflows from our hearts, through our house, on our calendars and all up in the business of our December days.

For the last 35 years, the first weekend of December has been spent with friends we love like family. Eleven of them and a bunch of us together every year to cook Christmas food in our pajamas. The Pruitts are a musical bunch with great voices. Thirty-five years of singing the same carols together can make for some very nice harmony.

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Pruitts and Northcutts with Kelseys beyond the picture

This year, our youngest daughter, Tessa added her voice to the harmony line.

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Tessa with her ukelele. She has a personal policy against matching her pajamas.

At her school, Tessa is known as the girl with the hair. She has the heart of an artist with a talent for music and drama. Unfortunately, beneath the hair, she also has the head of an artist, slightly clueless about the practicalities of life. Now a few months past her 16th birthday, she has yet to take the test to get her driving permit. She is having trouble passing the online practice tests because paying attention to driving practices has never been important to her. When asked to identify the pedals used to drive a car, she could name the accelerator and the brake. The third pedal on the far left stumped her. After a a small pause of contemplation, she threw out her best guess. She thought perhaps it was an eject button.

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The winning team from our party game, Tic Tac Christmas Toe

There were fifty people in our home for our annual Christmas party. The elf with the glasses at the bottom of the photo is Casey, Tessa’s shorter big sister. Casey never grew beyond her tiny five foot, size skinny-butt stature. So when she graduated from college she worked with a mission group in Thailand where the average Asian citizen could look her in the eye without taking a knee. After a couple of years there, she returned to Kentucky and married a guy she met in Thailand. They now live near us. He is in the accounting program at Murray State University and she works as a freelance writer in her size extra small pajamas in their 500 square foot tiny house.

Casey and her husband, Ben Watson . . . not to be confused with her brother, Ben Northcutt. This has brought communication complications to our family get-togethers.

Casey and her husband, Ben Watson . . . not to be confused with her brother, Ben Northcutt. There are currently all kinds of communication complications at our family get-togethers.

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Ben Northcutt with his two youngest girls, Rorie and Emme

Our oldest, Ben, married a patient and responsible woman, filling in the holes in his own personality. They now have their own children. He is a youth director at a Methodist Church in Vicksburg, Mississippi and will finish a PhD in ministry this year. The young lad who once laughed in the face of every responsibility now has four children ages six and under. His oldest is a perfectionist. The only boy is a carbon copy of his father. Ben’s third child is a spitfire who will, I predict, rip away his sanity as she bends to give him butterfly kisses. The youngest has him wrapped firmly around her toddler finger. Frankly, watching him flounder in the parental role is my reward for not killing him as a kid.

Our grandchildren, Bella, Jack, Emme and Rorie with their mother, Jessica

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Emme, the barbarian angel

Peter and Tessa also left food for the reindeer.

Leaving food for Santa’s reindeer on Christmas Eve is a tradition. Not long after throwing out the oatmeal and glitter, Emme, Ben’s middle child, who will eventually give back to her daddy all the moments of exasperation he gave to me, crawled across the porch and stuck her tongue in a puddle of puppy pee. Pay back always comes around, Benji, my boy! Yours has come as a precocious, little barbarian who can melt a heart with a glance of her eye.

Christmas cookies are also a tradition for us.

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Peter with our grandson, Jack

And climbing trees to gather mistletoe on Christmas Eve.

Peter can always depend on his brother, Micah, to give him a little boost when he needs it.

At 22, Peter is still the lightest of the Northcutt men.

What happens to a skinny little boy who gets left behind by his family once or twice or 25 times a year? He finds unusual ways to prove to himself that his family has his back . . . or his butt to give him a lift when he needs it. Peter is quite the man now. He launders his clothes by himself and buys his own onsie pajamas. Given a couple of months head start, he can grow a beard for No Shave November. I no longer direct his every move but he works as a youth director at a church near us and has a dozen other mothers to take my place. The change of a major at Murray State University has added a year to his time there. He plans to graduate in 2017 with an English major and a vague recognition that he will need a job after he does so. He isn’t worried. He figures God has promised to direct his path. It is hard to argue with that.

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My middle child, Micah, and his wife, Melissa. I have passed to her the responsibility of tending to Micah. It is a blessing and a curse.

The smile in this picture tells you that Micah hasn’t changed much. That is the face that drove me to the frayed end of my parenting rope, and used the excess to tie his school teachers in mental knots. In May, he graduates with an MBA and will turn his penchant for dancing around lines of behavior and conduct to the corporate world. I suggest now that his future employer instigate a casual dress policy in the work place. I can tell you from experience that after spending a day directing Micah in a task, neckties pulled tightly would make it much too easy to end the frustration. From here on, someone other than Greg and I will have to see that Micah uses his talents for good and not for evil. With love and a lack of understanding, his wife promised before God that she would always do so. Hopefully his boss will be paid well enough to help her out.

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Christmasing with my kids and grandkids

This is me during Christmas and it is a pretty good depiction of my holiday. In the kitchen . . . with a mess surrounding me . . . low on sleep, high on stress and strung out on Christmas sugar . . . directing the Christmas activity of my family . . . and loving every second of it.

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This is all 14 of us . . . plus Doug . . . who, despite what Greg thinks, is a dog and not a human member of the family.

We all wish you a Merry Christmas . . . 2015 or 2016 . . . you figure it out.

My First Applause

My grandparents were my best audience. Always.

Linda Leigh (my namesake) and J.O. Vincent were my mother’s parents. In my mind, J.O. was a jovial giant kind of man. He wasn’t overweight and he wasn’t unusually tall. But he was a broad-shouldered, sturdy man with a big presence. He had a gentle, intelligent twinkle in his eye and a kindness for everyone. Those who knew him looked up to him whatever their relative height. He smelled of cigars and when I crawled into his lap, I did too. Once there, odds were that he and I would sing his favorite folk song.

“A frog went a-courtin’ and he did ride, M-hm, M-hm. A frog went a-courtin’ and he did ride, M-hm. A frog went a-courtin’ and he did ride, sword and pistol by his side, M-hm, M-hm, M-hm.”

Linda was the sterner of the two. In both profession and personality, she was a teacher of the old-school variety. Her displeasure was a powerful motivator that could tame a school classroom or subdue the most errant of her grandchildren (which, by the way, was always my little brother). I’m not sure why we loved my grandmother so much. Maybe it was because she required us to be our best; and our best surprised and pleased us. Maybe it was because we felt that to be loved by her raised us to a level above most others.

Together, they were an unusual couple. He was a farm boy; she grew up in the city. She was Presbyterian; he was Baptist. She liked to go to the theater because she could be a bit of a social snob. He liked to go to the basement where she allowed his spittoon and his tobacco chewing habit.

Together, they were a united front. The two of them were . . . shhhhh . . . closet Republicans . . . in a county of vocal Democrats. They both gave their productive years to the Kentucky education system and their spare time to The University of Kentucky’s televised basketball games. He grew a garden. She took his food and fed their family well. They built a home where their grandchildren would have their best memories of childhood.

They lived a few streets down from my family and, being from the generation that played outside as a kid and in the period of time when our parents did not worry about us playing outside, I rode my bicycle to their house often.

“Do you have any new jokes?” Granddaddy asked every time we sat down to supper.

I always had new jokes.

“Why did the belt get arrested? Because he held up a pair of pants.”

Granddaddy laughed.

“Why are frogs so happy? Because they eat whatever bugs them.”

He laughed every time. And the man knew how to laugh.

“Why did the boy fall off the building? Because he was smoking a cigarette and he threw off the wrong butt.”

That particular joke initially produced silence. Then my grandmother had a refined conniption fit at the use of the word “butt” in her kitchen. But it didn’t matter because I could hear the chuckle that Granddaddy tried to cover.

Those jokes were my first performance lines before a crowd and I commanded that stage every time I took it. The audience loved me!

As I got older, I began to write. And it came out funny. When I sat down with a pencil and a creative thought, my tongue inevitably found its way into my cheek and humor filled the page. My high school teachers were not big fans. But my grandparents thought it was wonderful! When I left home for college and then marriage, they continually asked me to write. I would gather up the funny, inane pieces of my life (usually supplied by my husband) and send them to Grandmother and Granddaddy in a letter.

At one point, because I had not written them in good while and they were firmly suggesting that I should, I wrote them a letter without taking the time to add humor. I got a phone call. My grandmother let me know that, although she and my grandfather were happy to hear from me, I should never again hurry to write to them. If they wanted the facts of my life, they would ask my parents. They wanted me to take the time to find my funny. They wanted me to pour it through my pencil, package it up and send it to them.

I have been told that when my grandfather found one of my letters in the mail, he took it home to my grandmother and they eagerly opened it. She read it aloud and together they laughed.

There isn’t much I would not give now to be in an audience somewhere and watch them laugh.

My grandparents with seven of their eight grandchildren.

The Cat and His Boy

My husband rescued our cat, Pete, from the animal shelter in the Summer of 1997 and put him in our barn to control the mouse population. Pete stayed there for about 15 minutes and then, with an unhurried gait, he walked out of the barn, across the field, under the fence, through the yard and up the steps to our house. He took his place on our front porch where he would live for the next 17 years. He would not be told where to sleep or given parameters in which to roam. He could not be contained by the walls of the barn although my husband tried several times to keep him there.

He knew he was not with us to clear our barn of rodents. Pete had come to reign over our farm from his seat on the welcome mat at our front door.

Being allergic to cats, I kept a distance between Pete and me. That was fine with him. He was not born to be a lady’s lap-sitter. He was a hunter and a protector. Too proud to eat our packaged Cat Chow charity, Pete hunted his own food.

To prove to us his hunting prowess, he left the spoils of his nightly raids, the hearts and kidneys of our mice and mole enemies, on the welcome mat for us to find in the mornings. It was his way of saying, “I am on the job. No need to worry about things today. I will be watching over the farm while you are out.”

From the day Pete joined us, the other animals knew he ruled our place. If they questioned his authority, a quick flick of a claw put them in their places. Pete bowed to only one, our four-year-old son, Peter. (I realize that to name a child Peter and an animal Pete may seem odd. But, being lovers of good stories, my husband and I named our son for a character in The Chronicles of Narnia and our cat after the barn cat in the Hank the Cowdog books.)

It took Pete about a day and a half to realize that if Peter was to live to manhood, he needed more than his father and me looking out for him. We had three older children and Peter tended to get lost in the shuffle. With commiseration and a bit of pity in his eyes, Pete gave me a nod that said, “You’ve got your hands full. I’ll take care of this one.” And he stepped in to become Peter’s companion.

They developed an unusual friendship. That cat let our young son mistreat him terribly. Any other animal of Pete’s nobility would have fled the embarrassment. But, with fortitude and indulgence, Pete allowed himself to be caught when Peter chased him around the yard. After getting his hands on the cat, Peter would pick him up by the tail, hang him upside down by his back legs, and carry him around the yard with his front paws dragging the ground.

Pete never squirmed, fought or clawed his way out of Peter’s arms. He just hung there in discomfort, wondering, I’m sure, how many years it would be before Peter outgrew the game. Occasionally, the cat would mew a little. It didn’t seem to be a protest aimed at Peter. I felt it was more of a reassurance for me.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got this. Really, I do.”

One day, a few months after Pete arrived, I returned home from the grocery store to find our two oldest boys playing basketball in the driveway and Peter watching from the yard. I knew without asking that his brothers had said he could not play with them. Peter followed me onto the front porch and slumped into a rocking chair with a sigh that whispered four-year-old sadness. Pete jumped into his lap to join him.

I left the two of them there and went inside with my groceries. In just a bit, I began to hear sounds coming from the porch. The pounding of small feet scurrying across the porch was followed by little boy giggles. Little boy laughter was accentuated by the thudding of young legs jumping on the floor boards. Peter was happy again.

The front door flew open and Peter ran in, filling the room with the odor of outside play, “Mama, Mama, come watch me play basketball! Pete and I are playing basketball, Mama!”

Peter had gone from mournful to merry in two shakes of a cat’s tail. (I feel sure Peter had done the actual tail shaking.) I could have kissed that cat, allergic or not.

I followed Peter out the door, entering into his imaginary basketball game. “Is Pete playing for the other team?” I asked. “Who is winning? You or Pete?”

I expected to see my son chase his cat around the porch with a ball in his hands. Instead, Peter walked to the top of the porch steps, picked up Pete and said. “He isn’t on the other team.”

“Is he on your team?”

“No, he’s not on my team either.”

“Then how are you and Pete playing basketball together?”

Hanging upside down, Pete gave me an indignant glare that said, “This one! You are gong to owe me big time for this one!”

“Pete isn’t a ball player, Mom,” My son said with a big smile. “He is the ball!”

Then, as I watched in amazement, that regal, proud, fierce, wonderful cat closed his eyes and let my son roll his body into a ball and pitch him off the porch.

I wrote this story to be submitted to another publication so it reads a bit differently than the humor I usually post here. But you can’t know our family’s story without knowing of Pete. He was the best cat ever to love a family. He is buried under the tree that shades our front porch.

The Kids We Lost

Those of you who know my husband and I know that we tend to lose our children. It’s not that we aren’t good parents. We are very good parents. We just misplace our kids. We routinely leave them places. By “leave them”, I mean that we take them out with us and forget to bring them home again. By “places”, I mean anywhere/everywhere in Marshall County, certain regions of western Kentucky and as far east as Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

It has happened so often, I have labeled the leavings to keep them straight in my mind. The “Youngest” happened when our fourth child was 18 months old. After visiting in the home of family friends, we told our three oldest kids to get in the car and forgot to load the youngest. Fifteen miles down the road, I turned around and found an empty car seat. After we left, our friends turned around and found our toddler.

The “Dumbest” leaving occurred when son #3 wanted to go to basketball practice with son #2 so he could watch the guys play ball. I took two sons to the basketball gym and dropped them off. Two hours later, I drove back to the gym, picked up one son and left the other one there.

We left a daughter at the library once. I call that one “Acceptable on academic grounds”. She was there with nothing to do but read and with none of us there to distract her. How is that bad?

“Bad” happened when we left church one Sunday, drove to McDonalds for lunch, lined up the kids to ask them what they wanted to eat and noticed that we were missing one. None of us could remember if the missing child had been in the car while we drove to the restaurant . . . including the child who was sitting beside the empty seat. We returned to church to find the building empty. It was a couple of hours before we found that child again. I have labeled that, “By far the scariest” of the leavings.

Let me assure you that, to date, when we have lost our children, we have always found them again. I gave birth to five children. There are five children in our latest family picture. I’m pretty sure they are the same five. So . . . hey . . . no harm, no foul.

No, it’s not our children that we have genuinely lost. It is the kids that used to visit us that are gone.

Their names were Ashley, Sahka and Moo and they showed up at our house often when our youngest daughter was little. Ashley and Sahka were good children, always ready and eager to play with Tessa. Moo was a little devil in disguise. He continually got Tessa in trouble, telling her to disobey and do mean things to her brothers and sister.

Tessa was very protective of them. Her much-older brother had a tendency to sit on them. She bravely fought him off, screaming and hitting him with the hardest of her little-girl punches, protecting them as if she were their mother rather than their friend. She read them books, told them her best stories and broke up their fights when they all wanted to sit on floor beside her.

In return, they always came when she wanted to play.

Tessa loved Ashley, Sahka and Moo. And, although none of the rest of us could see them, we were glad to have them around because they were hers and she was ours. (Or maybe, we were glad to have them because watching Tessa play with them, talking and teaching and reprimanding Moo, made us laugh out loud every time. It also made her siblings sleep with one eye open, pondering the fact that their sister was hearing voices and wondering what Moo’s voice would tell her to do in the middle of the night.)

Over time, Tessa’s friends came to our house less often. One day, we realized they no longer visited at all. Their days of playing with Tessa were gone and we had not noticed they were ending. We didn’t say good-bye to them.

Tessa is now almost 16. Last week, we went to see Inside Out at the theater. (You should see the movie!) Inside the animated head of 11-year old Riley, we were amused and entertained and empathetic and “at home”. We oohed and we aahed and we laughed and we groaned because what Riley felt and thought, we had all, at one time or another, experienced.

Then, Bing-Bong, the imaginary friend that Riley had not thought about in years, came on the screen. As my husband and I watched, our eyes teared up and over. Our throats tightened and our hearts hurt a little because Ashley, Sahka and Moo were suddenly there too. They hadn’t changed at all over the years. They were still impish and playful; and when we breathed them in, we could smell the scent of Tessa’s childhood. We knew they were only there for a few minutes. So, we gathered up the memories and held them to us tightly as if to say, “We remember you and you were good. You were very good.”

Experience has taught us that when you look away, scenes change, so we didn’t take our eyes from the movie. We had already learned the fate of imaginary friends. At some point, they can’t be pretended any more. So, we were prepared for the end of the scene and as Riley left Bing-Bong behind in the movie, we took a whimpering breath and said good-bye to Ashley, Sahka and Moo.

Keeping up Caitlyn Jenner

I spent time this week standing in Walmart catching up on all that is important in the world. We all have to gather our information about global events somewhere. The President has the Daily Briefing written by the Director of National Intelligence. My son, the MBA student, has the Wall Street Journal. I have the gossip magazines in the checkout lanes at Walmart.

FYI, the president of Brazil has a lower approval rating than President Obama has. Bed bugs caused a mobile home fire in North Carolina. And Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion, has become a transgender woman and is calling himself Caitlyn.

It seems that everybody and their Great-Aunt Sissy has an opinion about Bruce/Caitlyn. What you can not read at Walmart is available on your Facebook feed. Some lady at the Huffington post says Bruce has been Caitlyn since before birth because gender identity is rooted in the brain. A blogger who writes about Hollywood life said it’s amazing to see Caitlyn finally living life the way she wants to and thinks she is looking “pretty fabulous”. Ellen DeGeneres called Caitlyn courageous. Christian bloggers, for the most part, have responded with temperance and respect.

Amidst the research about the causes of transgender personalities, the affirmations of courage and the promises of prayer for Bruce/Caitlyn, I have a few thoughts of my own. Mostly, I have serious questions about the situation! I’m wondering what could possibly make a man choose to give up the 8.45 minutes it takes him to get ready in the morning and take on the grooming chores of a woman?!

Bruce can shower in a minute and a half. If he doesn’t have an extra minute and a half, he can wash the dried saliva from his face while he brushes his teeth and call his grooming done for the day.

Does he know what Caitlyn will have to do each morning? Is he prepared to drag her body out of bed 30 minutes before her eyes will open and spend two hours getting it ready to leave the house? Does he have enough room in his shower for her 15 bottles of beauty washes, shampoos, conditioners and lotions? Can he shave her legs by touch because her eyes won’t focus that early in the morning?

Will he be able to dry her hair hanging upside down off the side of the bed to give it that bit of extra volume? Does he have an extra $500 a month to spend on her make-up products? Can he tweeze the stray hairs from her eyebrows without crying mascara down her chin?

I just don’t think Bruce has given this enough thought!

For the most part, men have no clue what it is like to be a woman.

If you are a man, take a moment to look at your fingernails. Are they chipped? Are they nibbled to the quick? Do they have dirt and grease caked underneath them? Well, guess what? Nobody cares! In the same situations, women have been known to spend their kids’ lunch money on emergency manicures. Kids can live on two meals a day.

Now, check your feet. Are your toenails polished? Do you have nail polish that will match your shirt? How about your pants? Can you throw on a scarf to match a color of polish you have? Do you have other outfits that will match the same polish? Are you willing to re-polish tomorrow? You may have to wear closed-toe shoes. Do you have an outfit that will match your closed-toe shoes?

If you answered “no” to the majority of these questions, . . . YOU DON’T HAVE A CLUE ABOUT WHAT WOMEN DO!

The truth is that men don’t give grooming matters the meticulous, comprehensive thought that women do.

For example, when leaving on an overnight trip, women pack thoroughly. For us, an overnight stay could require up to six full-size suitcases: one for our toiletries, one for the books we wish we had time to read, one for the clothing we need for every possible occasion, one for the 15 pairs of shoes we need to match the clothing we brought for every possible occasion, one for the shoes and clothing our BFF traveling companions may have forgotten, and one to bring home all the stuff we intend to buy while we are gone. Men can pack for an overnight trip in a sandwich bag. A pair of cleanish underwear and the aforementioned toothbrush will just about do it.

Can men learn to think and act like women? Well, I don’t know.

Can they spend 45 minutes in front of a mirror at JCPenney pondering whether or not the pants they are wearing make their butts look big? Can they check their hair and make-up in the reflection of photo frames and refrigerator doors without anyone noticing? Can they sight a chin hair from a hundred paces and pluck that thing with their bare fingertips?

Above all, can they learn to go to the bathroom in groups of ten where they can check their hair, make-up and chin hairs together and help each other decide if their butts look big?

Calling All Mothers

When I was a child, the members of my family shared a telephone. It was a large, beige phone with a rotary dial that cradled a handheld receiver and it sat on a table in our family room.

It was a simple device. It couldn’t direct us across the country, order our groceries or launch a nuclear weapon. But it could make a phone call and that was good enough.

The procedure for using it was easy to understand. To make a call, we picked up the receiver and dialed. To answer a call, we put the receiver to our ear and said, “Hello”. To eavesdrop on the neighbor who shared our party line, we covered the mouthpiece with our hand, put the receiver to our ear, and hid behind the couch so my mother could not see us.

That was really all there was to it.

My dad, who had big hands, learned to dial with a pencil because his fingers often slid into the wrong holes on the dial. My mother, who was a seasoned telephone user, learned to cradle the receiver between her chin and neck so her hands were free to flip through a magazine or dig through her purse to find quarters for the ice cream truck or swat the backsides of her children as they ran through the house. But those were skills that came with experience. You could make a phone call without them.

When it rang, it did not set off a frenzied “Where can it be?” hunt. We didn’t run from room to room to find it. We didn’t rummage coat pockets, empty purses or throw the cushions off the couch. And we never once followed the sound of the ring to the other side of the refrigerator door. We simply walked to the table and picked up the phone.

Sometimes I miss that old-fashioned telephone. It was solid and dependable and very hard to lose.

My cell phone, on the other hand, is not hard to lose. And it causes me all kinds of problems.

My family has threatened punishment if I don’t learn to keep the stupid thing with me. That does not upset me terribly. Frankly, I’m thinking, “What can they do?”

I suppose they could slap my hand and confiscate my phone. If they did that, they could no longer call me at any and every moment of the day to find . . . and pick up . . . and go after . . . and come get . . . and help with all the stuff they need me to find, pick up, go after, come get and help with. That might tie their knickers in a knot. But, it sounds pretty good to me.

They could ground me. That would mean I would not be able to leave the house . . . not to deliver forgotten homework to school for the twelfth time in five days, . . . not to load a 250 pound bag of dog food into a shopping cart with two bum wheels and wrestle it up and down the aisles of Walmart. . . not to put in a gazillion and a half “She’s a stay-at-home mom so let’s put her in charge” parent volunteer hours. I’m okay with that too.

At the very worst, I figure they could put on their “We’re really serious!” faces and send me to my room for the day. I would be alone in my room . . . to nap or read . . . in peace and quiet . . . without my Virtuous Woman Wannabe’s List of 700 Things to do Today. Do they call that punishment? Really? Well, I say, “Bring it on!!”

So, here is the plan for me and all the other mothers like me. I say we accidentally set our cell phones on fire, accept our penances without argument and spend the day in our rooms reading, napping, and talking to each other . . . on our old-fashioned, land-line telephones.

Unmasked by a Dumb, Homeless Guy and a HoneyBaked Ham

It is time to talk about the ham incident of 2014.

Some of you will recall my Facebook posts about it. I am not proud of the way I responded to the situation. I have much to confess about my attitude at the time. I can only hope that you do not lose the bit of respect you may have developed for me. How would you ever find it again amongst the realizations that I am a lunatic?

Oh, well . . . it must be done. Let me tell you the story.

It was a week before Christmas and I was beyond busy. The Christmas season takes the crazy of my normal day, wraps it up with a strand of stress and ties a big, frazzled bow on top. And on this particular day, I was running late . . . again.

I was headed to an appointment with my beautician because, as we all know, no woman wants to spend Christmas with the roots of her hair looking like Santa’s beard. As I drove up the main street of our little town singing The Christmas Song with James Taylor on the radio, I glanced to the left at my husband’s law office.

I saw two boxes sitting on the porch. I had gotten a notification from Amazon saying that the theology books I had ordered for my nephew’s Christmas present had been delivered. So I knew what was in the smaller box. I slowed down as I approached the building and squinted at the larger box, “What in the world? . . . Hey, maybe . . . Could it be? . . . I think it might . . . Yes, it is! . . . Hallelujah! . . . It’s my HoneyBaked Ham!”

Give me a few seconds to tell you about my HoneyBaked Ham.

This is no ordinary ham. It is a fine, lean specimen of a ham, marinated in a sauce made with Christmas magic, smoked over hardwood chips, topped with a smack-your-mama, sweet sauce, and spiral sliced for my convenience. The ham is sent to my husband every Christmas by a long-time client and it is so good your mama will turn the other cheek when you slap her . . . as long as you share a little of it with her.

It is delicious. But there is oh-so-much more to this ham. Because our family Christmas meal is traditionally shrimp, I freeze the ham and serve it on the following Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is, by far, the biggest of the sit-down meals in our extended family. There is an overwhelming amount of food on the table and preparation time spent in the kitchen. Ownership of that ham (which, by the way, I simply thaw and serve) gives me the ability to assign the purchasing, storing, preparing, baking, and carving of the turkey to my sister-in-law.

I love that ham.

It was late in coming that December and I had begun to worry about it a bit. But the ham was there, sitting on the office porch. James Taylor was singing carols in my car. The town around me was celebrating the season with holiday spirit. All was well with my Christmas.

My husband’s office was closed that day for one of his many out-of-office holiday experiences. (The man knows how to enjoy the season.) I thought for a moment that I should stop and pick up the packages. But, as I said, I was late for my appointment. And, as I thought then, what could happen in the middle of the day . . . in Calvert City, Kentucky . . . home of 2500 good-hearted people . . . celebrating the birth of Jesus . . . and sending each other Christmas cards that say, “Hey, Yall, Peace on Earth Today”?

So, I drove past the office leaving my nephew’s books and my HoneyBaked Ham on the porch. An hour and a half later I drove back to get them.

They were gone!

I was stunned.

Gone? How could they be gone?! This is Calvert City! Who in our small-town, America, would steal a neighbor’s Christmas packages? And do we really have a citizen dumb enough to take them from the porch of the city attorney’s office?

I was astonished. I was confounded. I was furious.

Some low-down, no-account Christmas grinch had taken my ham!

My one consolation was that the thief had also taken two books about Christian theology. I hoped they would smote him with guilt and condemnation. If I could have gotten hold of him, I would have smote him with a few other things.

I wrote my anger on my Facebook page that night, “I love HoneyBaked Ham and they don’t come cheap! Oh, Christmas thief, I have but a few words for you. The others I will keep to myself. YOU HAD BETTER BE HOMELESS AND HUNGRY OR I WANT MY HAM BACK!”

At this point, you probably think I over-reacted. You may have concluded that I am actually a lunatic. Perhaps I did. More than likely, I am. But in one act of Christmas crime, the wholesome shine on my small town community was tarnished, Thanksgiving, 2015, was severely compromised, and some dumb, homeless guy had my ham.

Ironically, the dumb guy did not have to take it.

I would have given my ham to a hungry man if he had asked.

I would have given my ham to a hungry man if he had asked.

Stop right here.

Do you see Him?

At this point in the story, I ran smack dab into Jesus. And, I stumbled all over that last thought. Not because it isn’t true. It is. I would have absolutely given away the ham to a person who needed it . . . quickly and easily . . . with a cheerful heart and very little regret.

It seems that was actually the problem. If I could cheerfully give away my ham, why was I so angry because someone had taken it? Either way, my ham was gone and I would have a hand crammed up a turkey butt the following Thanksgiving.

As Jesus pointed out to me . . . (and by this time, I was completely off balance) . . . the dumb, homeless guy in my imagination had taken more than my ham. He had also taken the opportunity for me to give it to him . . . to do a kindness for a person less fortunate . . . to feel good about myself.

Do you see the problem? In both scenarios, my ham was gone and a hungry man had been fed. But, in the first, the ham was taken from me and I was furious. In the second, I gave away the ham and I felt good about myself. Evidently, even in an act of generosity, I am mostly about me.

Well, crap! (At this point, I sat down at His feet and let self-condemnation puddle around me.) I thought I was getting better. I’ve been walking with Jesus for a long time and I really thought I was getting better. You know what I mean . . . becoming more like Christ . . . keeping my eyes set on spiritual things above the physical plane . . . learning to die to my own desires.

Jesus sat down beside me and the puddle dried up. There is no condemnation in His presence.

We spent some time together and then we both got up and moved on.

He had reminded me.

My life with Jesus is no longer about getting better.

My ham and the books reappeared the following day. A few hours after depositing the boxes, the UPS man drove back by my husband’s office. When he noticed that the boxes were still on the porch, he picked them up again and re-delivered them the next day.

In my next Facebook post, I apologized to the fictional thief for my bad attitude.

Reflections of a Mental Marathoner

I am a daughter of the South.

Not the current South of Paula Deen, Duck Dynasty and (Lord, love her) Honey Boo Boo. I’m talking about the South that belonged to my grandparents . . . the South where the temperatures were hot, the air was unconditioned and everything moved at a leisurely pace to hamper the progression of sweat that rolled down their backs and dripped into their shoes. A checker game took the better part of an afternoon. A porch swing swayed to the unhurried tempo of The Old Rugged Cross. Even the vowel sounds were twice as long as they needed to be.

That is the heritage of the South that God planted in my genes. The metronome that sets the pace for my life clicks at a slow beat.

I like to think all around a subject. And it takes awhile.

I tend to walk in contemplation. So I move slowly so as not to bash my shins on the bits and bites in the world that I have failed to notice.

I am a marathoner. Which, by the way, drives my husband, the sprinter, to exasperated distraction. I have learned to smile and wave as he passes me on the day’s journey. I’ll find him again by nightfall, lying face down in a puddle of pooped.

Please, don’t think that I can’t work at a fast pace. I can and I do when it is necessary. But it stresses me. And it isn’t pretty. It isn’t at all pretty.

Do you doubt me? You should not.

The Saturday before Easter I hosted a big family dinner . . . the kind of dinner a woman periodically puts together to remind her children that she can cook and assert to her husband that she can compete with his mother. I said, “No, thanks. I’ve got this.” to all offers of help and cooked an early Easter meal for my husband, kids, niece, nephews and in-laws.

To further impress my family, I put together a game of Easter Jenga with over-sized Jenga blocks complete with candy and prizes for the winners. Nothing says, “Happy Easter” like a giant bubble wand, glow-in-the-dark Mardi Gras glasses, an M & M coffee cup and a battery operated fart piano I found in the Walmart clearance isle.

I also needed to take a chunk from the afternoon to finish shopping for the Easter bunny and attend the funeral of a dear friend’s father.

I had to set the dial on my inner metronome to its highest setting to get through that day. The needle on the dial began to shake terribly and a red light blinked a foreshadowing message, “Warning! Slow this sucker down! This is not going to be pretty! This is not going to be at all pretty!”

I didn’t have time to stop and read the message.

The events of the previous day determined that I would spend two hours in the middle of the night at Walmart, roaming the isles with six other sleep-deprived people who couldn’t remember why they were there and one woman who was chirpy and cheerful because her husband was babysitting and there were no children in her cart. I was in bed at 2:30 a.m. and up again at 7:00.

Running hard on four and a half hours of sleep, I began to cook. Before noon, I had marinated a pork loin in a soy sauce concoction, cooked my son’s favorite strawberry pretzel salad, chilled six batches of jello jiggler jelly beans as requested by my daughter, made a bowl of Texas caviar, thawed blackberries for two cobblers, set out vegetables to be cooked later, cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, and rearranged furniture so I could feed a larger crowd.

Me, a marathoner?

Not that day!

I had become a sprinter!

And my brain was fried.

Because my overworked synapses had shut down and gone on strike as I dressed for the funeral that day, I forgot it was Tater Day weekend. (For those of you who are not local to my end of Kentucky, and are wondering what a Tater Day would be, put on your redneck-colored glasses and picture flea markets, funnel cakes and a three day traffic jam.)

Because I had forgotten it was Tater Day weekend, I did not leave home in time to work my way through the traffic and get to the funeral on time.

Because I did not get to the funeral on time, I had no opportunity to put my arms around my grieving friend.

Because I was blinded by a fog of bad-friend guilt, I missed the turn-off for Walmart and got on the highway to head home without shopping for the Easter bunny.

Because I had to go miles out of my way to turn around and go back to Walmart, I lost even more of my dinner preparation time.

Because I was counting the many ways in which I am an idiot as I walked through Walmart, I miscounted the number of children I have and did not buy enough chocolate Easter bunnies.

Because I did not buy enough chocolate Easter bunnies at Walmart, I had to make an unplanned stop at the Dollar General Store near my house. (Making three trips to Walmart in 14 hours was not an option for me.)

Because I had to stop at the Dollar General Store before I got home, I was pushing my bladder to the limits of its capacity.

Because I was pushing my bladder to its limit, I was doing a special dance through the Dollar General Store.

Because I could not continue the dance in my car, I employed the jump up and down in the seat form of bladder control as I drove home.

Because I was jumping up and down in the seat of my car on the way home, I caught sight of myself in the rear view mirror.

When I caught sight of myself in the rear view mirror, I realized that Tater Day wasn’t all my burned-out brain cells had forgotten as I dressed for the funeral that day. Although I had brushed my teeth, curled my hair and applied a coat of foundation before I left the house, I had stopped there. I had not put on the rest of my make-up.

As I stared in horror at the reflection in the mirror . . . which was devoid of color and appallingly lifeless . . . except for my eyes which held an extra sparkle . . . because they were floating in the overflow of a brimming bladder, I reminded myself.

I am not a sprinter.

Sprinting stresses me.

And it isn’t pretty.

It isn’t at all pretty!

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