Occasionally out here in the country, we encounter critters of various kinds: possums, foxes, the rare raccoon, and skunks. A few years ago, my husband and I were awakened by a high-pitched squealing punctuated by a smell so noxious our eyes burned. We (he) investigated and found nothing outside our bedroom window, but it could only be skunks. It was not so unusual. Almost every winter, we would smell skunk around the house or see one every now and then eating the beetles beneath the spotlight on the barn.
That winter, it was more frequent. Just when the awful stench had worn off inside the house, we’d hear the squealing again in the middle of the night and brace ourselves for the fumes that would follow. Finally, I called in the big guns, an extermination company that trapped and “disposed of” unwanted critters. (Highly recommend: Animal Pros.)
Maybe you saw our segment on the news? When they searched our home’s crawl space, they emerged wearing expressions of startled disbelief. We had skunks alright. They’d moved in like prairie dogs and set up a village under our house. It looked like they’d probably been using the space each winter for years because there was approximately 300 pounds of skunk poop under there. Nope. Not a typo.
Year after year, as they made themselves at home, they’d ripped into the crawl space structure, torn into the duct work, and generally partied like it was 1999. Night after night, we wore masks sprayed with lavender, slept upstairs away from the worst of the smell, and cursed the sweet images of the skunk from the movie Bambi that made us dismiss these creatures as mostly harmless. Live and let live, right? Until they turned our crawl space into Da Club with everything but the strobe lights. We were operating the neighborhood Polecat Brothel, with the smell apparently attracting others like a neon sign from miles away.
We trapped nine skunks. Nine. After the news segment aired, the neighbors got alarmed and trapped seven of their own. Each night, the guys would set the traps, baited with oatmeal cream pies (who knew?), and just about every morning another hungover skunk would be in there, blinking in the sunlight.
Meanwhile, to the tune of $15,000 (Nope. Not a typo.), we had to completely overhaul the crawl space. Guys in hazmat suits cleared everything out (talk about Dirty Jobs!) and rebuilt our duct work. It was a miracle they hadn’t popped up through the floor vents and made friends with our cats.
It could’ve been worse. We heard about a family who had left for 2 weeks for an overseas adoption. Skunks got in through their vents and sprayed the whole house. When they returned, a new baby and toddler in tow, it was too toxic to breathe. It was like a house fire: a total loss. Clothing, furniture, sheet rock. Anything not under a glass surface (like pictures) was ruined. They razed the entire house and started over.
Also? I’ve read that the chemicals in their spray are flammable, so under just the right conditions, I guess we could have had little kamikaze flame throwers rutting around under our floorboards. Wouldn’t that have been toasty?
It’s human nature to justify, ignore, or deny. Whiny toddler? I’m too tired to deal with it. Sassy thirteen-year-old? She probably didn’t mean it. Two pieces of cake after dinner? What can it hurt, really? Snippy with your spouse? Whatever, man. Behaviors, habits, offenses pile up, and before you know it, you’ve got 300 pounds of you-know-what to shovel and stink that makes your eyes water.
It’s so much easier to take it a piece at a time and deal with things before they get ugly. I love Barney’s classic take on the issue in this clip: nip it in the bud! I don’t know about you, but this applies to so much in my life!
Not long after our skunk saga, we spotted one at the edge of our yard one evening. The whole family sprang into Level-10 lock-down. My son sent his all-terrain remote control car zipping after it while we offered guidance from a safe distance away. Confronted by the vehicle, it lumbered off, saddened, I’m sure, that we were no longer “open for business.”
At least I’ve got one thing under control. Now I’ve got to spray some WD-40 on my shears for some serious bud-nipping elsewhere.
My husband’s grandfather once held a job as an ambulance driver. This was back in the day when the nearest hospital was about an hour away and the town’s local ambulance also served as its Hearse, depending on the timing of the situation. Regularly, he would drive 100 mph on the interstate, sirens wailing. While he eventually gave up the ambulance gig, he still drove as if the sirens howled atop his Cavalier, well into his 80’s. I’m blaming my son’s driving on him. Kind of. Not really.
One by one, my father taught all five of us how to drive. We each learned the pedal coordination of a manual transmission. I was not allowed behind the wheel until I could successfully change a tire, find the hazard lights, and check the oil. He was calm but firm in his manner, frequently making acronyms out of instructions so they’d be easy to remember. TSBB = turn signal before brake. LOWR = lights on when raining. Everything’s an acronym in the military. “Be defensive,” he’d say. “You gotta watch out for Isadore Idiot.”
I can’t for the life of me figure out how he made it through five fledgling drivers without hard liquor, medication, or some unfortunate facial tics. Three years ago, our firstborn got her license. For the most part, teaching her went well. There was that time she drove our van down a shoulder-less road, steep ditches dropping on either side. For the next two days I couldn’t figure out why my right arm was so sore before it dawned on me that I’d been gripping the door handle, trying from the passenger seat to single handedly pull a 2000 pound vehicle away from the dropoff as it sped down the road.
The first time she merged onto an interstate, we were neck and neck with a semi, quickly running out of lane. My normally unflappable husband sat in the back seat behind her, a giant tire spinning beside his window, hoarsely screaming, “WE’RE NOT GONNA MAKE IT!” as my son obliviously played video games beside him. Once we finally merged, he directed her to immediately get off at the next exit and pull over, muttering under his breath that we’d almost wiped out the entire Blaylock line with that maneuver. Despite this, the daughter’s license was not so hair-raising for me.
The son, Fifteen, is another matter. I reasoned that all those years of riding tractors with his Papaw, zipping around on ATVs at the farm, and the superior hand-eye coordination he no doubt has developed from incessant video games should make this a walk in the park. True, if that park is Jurassic and there are velociraptors in the bushes.
Am I a perfect driver? No I am not. My record has some blemishes. A ticket here, a fender bender there. People often share knowing glances and accuse me of “making good time” on road trips. Still, passengers generally do not grip the armrests and pray out loud when riding with me.
I think it’s his demeanor. He is bright, happy, casual, and possesses no fear. Also, lately, he has decided to like the Electronica station on the radio. If you’re not familiar, this music–and I use the term loosely–is mostly repetitive synthesized beats that gradually ratchet up in intensity until you reach a “drop,” which you can tell by the seizure-inducing bass and change in tempo. He claims this music helps him concentrate. I claim it gives me an aneurysm.
Also, it could be that, while driving, he blithely poses curious questions that do not give me warm fuzzies. Such as: do you think you can you drive a car down the road backwards as fast as you can drive it forwards? Have you ever just pressed the gas all the way to the floor to how far the speedometer would go? These questions give me feelings similar to ones you might feel if your kid were to casually ask, “What, do you think, would be the fastest way to poison your parents where no one would ever know?” That is, suspicion and the slightest nudge of discomfort.
The other day, I agreed to let him drive around town to do some errands. It was not my finest hour. After about 45 minutes of my wise counsel and fielding comments like, “Well, that’s not how dad says I should do it,” I had one very small sinuous nerve left, and he was on it. We were sitting at a stop sign, the Electronica music was reaching an intense moment (if he’s going to play it on his own, he may as well play it while practicing), and the car in front of us moved through the intersection. He stepped on the gas to follow as if a red light had just changed to green.
As I looked to the left to see the oncoming car through the intersection, my brain raced with synonyms for the word “STOP,” but apparently decided that none of them were sufficient. I swung my left arm across his chest to somehow shield him from all harm, and instead, from somewhere in the depth of my terrified being, my brain accessed another, shall we say, less appropriate word, also containing four letters. This word, the mother of all of the worst words, clawed its way from my gut through my lips as I screamed. Turns out, hearing your mother yell this less than a foot away will also mercifully cause you to stop a vehicle.
I don’t remember my mother ever giving a single driving lesson. Maybe somewhere along the way, after repeated visions of her offspring in twisted heaps of metal, she no longer wanted to ride the roller coaster of near-death terror and the adrenaline depleted catatonia that follows. It’s just better not to know.
Hours later, once I could breathe normally again, it occurred to me that we are all student drivers of sorts. We climb behind the wheel giddy and eager for the freedom of the open road, when we can barely stay in our lane. We are cocksure and casual, leaning our elbows out the open window with an arrogant finger barely brushing the wheel. After about a month, surely well-seasoned by now, we discover the horn and its easy contempt for others. How often do I know better, thinking the road signs are merely suggestions rather than protection for myself and everyone else? How often do I sarcastically point out, “Well, that’s not how they said to do it?” Music loud and attention elsewhere, it’s easy to disregard the voice offering counsel from the passenger seat. I’ve surely given Jesus some aching arms from trying to pull me away from the ditches.
After our silent ride home that day, I apologized profusely and banned myself from further driving lessons. His father will have to press on from here, while I lock myself in the bathroom and suck on some soap.
Three days in a row, I have skipped out to the barn to feed the chickens and make sure the horse gets his carrot, and there, at the end of the barn, attached to the gate, I have run into a spider web spanning the entire barn aisle. Three days in a row, I have shrieked, flailed, and desperately smacked my clothing and whipped my hair, hoping to dislodge the eight-legged villainous insect that was probably creeping down my collar to bite me in the spine.
The first day, I was horrified. The second day, I was horrified and a bit annoyed that the giant web had been reconstructed. By the third day, I was horrified, annoyed at the spider, and kicking myself for my lack of memory. But today! Today I was prepared and armed with a rolled up newspaper, my sword which I brandished as I took halting steps towards the gate exit. And of course, today the spiderweb was gone. Apparently the spider was just as annoyed with me as I was with it and chose to relocate.
Anyone watching would have thought I’d gone mad. Step. Wave newspaper wildly in front of me. Step. Wave paper to the left and above head. Step, duck down. Wave paper to the right, squinting up into the shadowed corners. Those silky filaments can be so transparent in the right light. (I could take this as an indication that I might need glasses, but just yet I refuse to submit to the beckoning crook of Age’s finger.)
But anyone watching would not have known about the first two days I’d spent picking dead flies out of my hair. Or the time I went out to the back deck to water the plants and found a suspiciously large lump in the middle of an enormous spiderweb between the roof and deck railings. Curious, I inspected and was heartbroken to find the thin thread of a hummingbird’s beak poking out from its sticky cocoon. A terrorist spider was preying on the most innocent and fragile of creatures! After angrily ripping down its web, I lay awake at night thinking about how big a spider would have to be to eat an entire bird.
So that’s the thing. We all have our particular spiderwebs, things we’ve encountered and hit head on that make us flail around like maniacs on occasion. Our reaction to our spiderwebs might make those walking along beside us look at us with concern. They can’t feel the gossamer threads; they aren’t imagining the bird-eating spiders.
One of the great gifts of this messy, crooked, scratch-and-dent life we get to live is the privilege of showing up for each other. What a wonder if we can look at someone swatting and ducking at their personal spiderwebs and, even though invisible to us, we can come alongside and nod knowingly, yeah, me, too. Me, too. Next time it will be us, when life is swell and we’re whistling along, when we run right out into life’s traffic and freeze as the proverbial bus bears down.
When my children were very small, occasionally their imaginations would invent scary things in the night that would make sleep impossible. After songs and water and reassurances, the one thing that would usually get them to sleep was Angel Wings. I’d spread one of their blankets out underneath them and they’d lie in the middle. As I folded and tucked each side of the blanket around them, I’d tell them these were angel wings protecting them from all the Scaries.
The monsters under the bed when we are children morph into nasty spiderwebs when when we are grown. We call it being practical or being a realist and give it nice names, making it into a pet that slinks around our ankles with a sly grin, when really we are just getting cozy with fear. Instead of trying something new, heeding an inward call, taking a risk on ourselves, our talents, or our heart’s desires, we hang back, convinced there might be spiderwebs ahead, convinced that we will not have what it takes to brush them aside.
Too often, we go through life running from something that isn’t after us.
Ghosts. Spiderwebs hanging tattered and dusty, the spider long gone. All that hair-whipping and arm waving wasted energy because the spider had moved on long ago. We only imagined its sticky threads wrapping us in the snare of its cocoon, when all along we had been free to run and dance.
I hardly ever read comments on internet posts. I’m usually stunned by the hatred and nastiness people seem to take pleasure in at others’ expense. Don’t be someone else’s spiderweb. Don’t make the comment that plants a seed of fear and ugly. Don’t voice the judgement that says very little about the person you speak of and volumes about you.
We can all be someone else’s angel wings, wrapping each other in grace. We can all be a hand to hold, sweepers of spiderwebs, real and imagined. Is there anything sweeter? As George Eliot said, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
I am a stealth purger, forced to live in the shadows. If there were a court of law with juries and judges of packrats, I’d be led before them in shackles, their angry accusing eyes casting withering looks of disdain. The judge, outraged and shocked, wouldn’t hesitate to mete out the sentence for my capital offense. “You threw it AWAY? How could you?”
In my case, the judge looks suspiciously like my husband, King Packrat. Over two decades of marriage we have gone many rounds in the ring over the issue of keeping or tossing. Before we got married, our premarital counselor told us we “complemented” each other, which as it turns out was a nice way of saying we were complete opposites and we’d better buckle up.
I organize in files. He organizes in piles. His system drives me to the edge of my sanity as his piles grow and expand by the bedside or on the coffee table, where eventually they will topple and be tripped over (usually by me). Impossibly, he seems to know vaguely what is in each pile, sliding his fingers down towards the middle and plucking a rumbled paper from the stack, where it lay between junk mail and trade journals. Which is why, if the pile is moved or its items shelved or neatly put away, he panics and the tirades begin. Where did you put my stuff? I’ll never be able to find anything! His justification is that he’s prepared for any eventuality. You need it, he’s got it, and he loves to be able to produce just the thing. This is us, in a nutshell:
But see, he’s a busy guy and even a casual sifting through the piles reveals that not everything in there is worth holding on to. Gum wrappers? Catalogs for past conferences? Childhood report cards? This is a man who, at 47, still keeps pictures from first grade in his wallet, a wallet that is so fat with “keepsakes” it threatens to ruin him chiropractically.
Periodically, to maintain walkable pathways and useable shelf space, I purge. Gently, but with a giddy sort of uncontainable glee. I am unsentimental and cold, he said, as I tossed page after page of the kids’ school work and drawings. We might need that some day, he said, as I threw I away outdated science text books from college, donated bags of too-small clothing, and hauled to Goodwill boxes and bags of household detritus. A month after I die, I point out, you will be featured on TLC’s Hoarders!
No yard sales! Never a yard sale! I had one. Once. He prowled the tables, secretly pocketing items and taking them back inside, incredulous that I would sell perfectly good things. Apparently this stems from some long-held childhood resentment that his mother once sold his Matchbox cars to a friend at a yard sale, cars he believes could no doubt pull our country out of debt with their current market value. It’s always the mom’s fault.
A messy desk is a sign of genius, he quips. Studies have shown that disarray can boost creativity and get people to think outside the box. Cleanliness is next to godliness, I counter. Some truth there as well. People in clutter-free environments tend to make more moral, healthy choices, their clean conscience a reflection of their surroundings; chaos begets chaos.
Clutter, to me, is a choking ivy. I cannot abide. In our digital age, it’s gotten easier to tamp down the clutter. You can scan the best of your kids’ artwork instead of keeping an entire bin from each grade. Pinterest can show you how to make achingly cute bulletin boards or displays of choice items. Pinterest is an organizer’s fetish. And the Container Store! After an hour walking the aisles in there, I start hyperventilating and need to breathe into a paper bag, one pulled from a color-coordinated plastic bin and labeled with the appropriate font.
My father, widowered twice, has had the unenviable task of sorting through two lifetimes of belongings. He is approaching his 80’s and feels the Burden of Stuff, knowing all too well you can’t take it with you, no matter how clever you are. He lightens his load with generosity, offering random items each time he sees us. While we appreciate his impulse, we all carry our own acquired loads. With the death of my mother’s parents, some in her family were so consumed by greed and lust for stuff that it ended in murder and a prolonged court case, like something straight off NBC’s Dateline. We watched in disbelief and when my mother herself passed away, there was no scrabbling, grabbing, or conniving for any of her things. They were Just Things and would not bring her back or make the memory of her any sweeter.
Maybe it is that realization that makes it easy for me to live with an open hand. If I have it and you need it, help yourself. If it doesn’t add peace or benefit to my life, out it goes. Have you moved recently? Nothing makes you face the excess stuff in your life than being overwhelmed by mountains of boxes full of stuff you’d mostly forgotten about.
While my husband is out of town this week, I’ve been able to come out from the shadows and organize without reprisal. Don’t worry, hon, I haven’t touched anything vital to your existence. Plus, I know he’ll be bringing home suitcases full of Stuff and eventually I’ll have to start all over. It’s the Circle of Life.
At a barn sale recently, I had to smile when I spotted an entire rack of denim overalls. Apparently, along with boots and old farm tools, they’re now “vintage” enough to be trendy. Overalls were the only thing I ever saw my grandfather wear. In fact, I’ve never even seen a picture of him wearing anything else.
For decades, he wore them for fishing, gardening, bank meetings, and formal portraits. In the hot sun of Panama City, Florida, he often wore them shirtless and commando, one shoulder strap dangling from the back. He’d wear them until the buttons wore out, and then he’d hitch them up and pin them with fishing tackle. Denim Dickies with a collared tan or blue work shirt were utilitarian and tough, features that pretty much summed up his personality, too. He was a big man, standing 6’4″, but seemed even taller with a full head of thick white hair that stood on end from running his hands through it.
Like many in his generation, he grew up poor, scraping through the Depression in the deep South of Birmingham. Any work that could put food on the table was good enough for him. With just a 6th grade education under his belt, he worked on machinery, sold gasoline, and rented properties until he eventually owned a general store in Alabama. After several years of this, he pulled up stakes with his wife and four children and headed south to the Gulf, where he became one of the first to start a charter deep sea fishing business in Panama City.
He bought a fixer-upper boat in Tampa and headed north through a raging hurricane towards the docks that they would call home. His oldest son and younger daughter piloted the boat as it pitched and dipped through the stormy ocean, while he yelled at them to head straight into the walls of waves or they’d be swamped. When they finally docked in Bay County, he knew he’d picked a good vessel.
In the 50’s he invented a way to use electric motors that fed shells into machine gun turrets of B-29 bombers. He transformed these into electric fishing reels, bought all the surplus gun motors from across the country, and started a thriving business renting them to area fishermen. Heavy duty reels like these were essential in landing the 100-pound groupers they’d regularly catch in a day at sea.
We called him “Pappaw” only because it paired with “Mammaw,” our grandmother’s name, first uttered by a stray cat outside the screen door on her porch, mewling for food. “Meowmawww,” it cried endlessly, christening her forevermore.
Together they raised four children. The youngest contracted spinal meningitis before he was two and, with the vintage medicine of 1947, was pronounced terminal. One thing you didn’t do was defy Pappaw, and he’d already told the doctors that wouldn’t happen. So they brought their boy home and he lived. His hospital bed was a permanent fixture in their house from then on until he died over 40 years later, my grandmother caring for his every need daily. This was the definition of a special needs child, before there were programs, help, or even a name for what they shouldered.
I remember Pappaw hoeing his garden, growing beans, tomatoes, corn and things for Mammaw to can in the summers. He’d sweat and spit and curse to himself as he coaxed the sandy soil to cooperate. I think his secret fertilizer was fish guts, but I can’t prove it. I have a pitchfork that belonged to him. It sits in my barn with some other “vintage” tools, but I actually use it to clean the horse’s stall. I love its faded green paint and rusted tines, and the fact that the dirt and sweat from his laboring hands helped to make the wooden handle worn and smooth.
He is the epitome of vintage–a classic make from a certain time. The lessons I learned from his supper time lectures and from watching him work, hands never idle, are as much ingrained in me as the stains in the handle of the pitchfork. Vintage may be all the rage these days, and I love a good barn sale. I sure wish we could bring back the vintage “whos” along with the “whats”. Pappaw might have gotten a kick out of that rack of overalls. Wardrobe fit for a king.
It looked like they’d probably been using the space each winter for years because there was approximately 300 pounds of skunk poop under there. Nope. Not a typo.
cursed the sweet images of the skunk from the movie Bambi that made us dismiss these creatures as mostly harmless. Live and let live, right? Until they turned our crawl space into Da Club with everything but the strobe lights. We were operating the neighborhood Polecat Brothel, with the smell apparently attracting others like a neon sign from miles away.
(talk about Dirty Jobs!) and rebuilt our duct work. It was a miracle they hadn’t popped up through the floor vents and made friends with our cats.
e someone else’s spiderweb. Don’t make the comment that plants a seed of fear and ugly. Don’t voice the judgement that says very little about the person you speak of and volumes about you.
