Month: March 2012

My glass house has four walls.  It’s an older model, so it isn’t shatterproof.  I’m not afraid of fielding stones that might be thrown at it…being a former stuntwoman, I’ve learned how to duck and roll and get out of the way…and I have my own protective gear.  If you toss a stone my way, you’d better put some guts behind it, because if I don’t deserve it, I will be throwing it back…make no mistake.

I hold myself responsible for things that I say and do.  If there is blame to be placed for something I have caused, I will own it.  I don’t go out of my way to deliberately hurt people, as I don’t like the feeling when it is done to me.  In spite of my hard candy shell…I am all marshmallow inside.  I can handle being hurt…I just don’t like being disappointed.

I’ve been disappointed in the construction on my cyber pyramid for the past couple of weeks.  I’ve had to weather a complete computer meltdown and am rebuilding files that were lost in cyberspace.  It was a catastrophe when it happened…now it’s just an annoyance and inconvenient.  I really do prefer to fly without a net, and I think my writing is better when it’s off the cuff.

When I started building this cyber pyramid, I encouraged readers to add their own “graffiti” to the walls as well.  I’ve read all of the comments that the cyber travelers have left…good and bad.   I’m learning something new every day…some of it I’d rather not know…but that’s part of it.

Most of the guest graffiti artists have true talent and I welcome their addition to the wall.  While I don’t always understand or agree with some of the messages, it is now a part of this blog and will remain so forever.

And then there are the parasites…Cyber Carpet Baggers, who jump on, attaching their tentacles so they can push their wares.  Content is not important…it is quantity, not quality and the finish line for them is a profit margin.

My pyramid has been vandalized by Carpet Baggers.  Ads for Viagra, Xanax and Fetish Porn have been plastered across its side…links to links to links….

I expected some of that now and then…but suddenly I was inundated…thousands of links began to appear…most of them laughable…some of them illegal…and the worst of the bunch…the ones that jump the boundary of class and decency.

I struggled with whether or not to remove them…I do not believe in censorship.  I do, however, believe that in order to write on the pyramid wall, you should have read the blog.

I could not shut Pandora’s box…the links produced other links even more shocking than the front line attackers.

I really looked forward to the genuine posts, but washing the nonsense off of the wall was taking up hours of time.  The comment box has been shut off temporarily.

I expect it to be up again soon.  In the meantime, I will continue blogging and hope that in your cyber travels you will stop by and take a look.

Day Two Hundred and Ninety Two…forewarned is forearmed…

Cynthia Neilson

I live outside of the Nashville area.  When someone who lives in the city asks me where my farm is, I tell them to keep driving until they see people climbing the poles to answer their phones…I live about ten miles past that.

Don’t get me wrong, I love living in the country.  I can’t picture myself returning to reside in  NYC, even with the lure of fantastic museums and theatre and great Italian bread from Brooklyn or REAL pizza.

All New Yorkers know that there is something in the water that makes the bread as good as it is.  Italian bread connoisseurs can attest that an authentic loaf is crunchy and firm and the inside should be filled with hollow spots.  And real pizza needs the proper amount of fresh mozzarella and just enough olive oil dripping out after you fold your slice in half to eat it.

Neither of these exists in this area…oh, I’ve heard rumors of sightings…but they turn out to be just that…rumors…and wishful thinking.

There is no pizza or Chinese food delivery here either, and my kids had a hard time adjusting to that at first.  Back in NYC, the guys at the pizza parlor knew my voice when I called in to place a order for delivery.

Any time visitors make plans to come and spend time on our farm, there is a standing request to bring bagels and bread from Brooklyn.  One time I had a pizza FedExed to us from our favorite place on Staten Island…but it wasn’t the same.

Cultural and epicurean differences aside, I consider myself lucky every day to be able to walk out of my door and look at nothing but trees and hills and creeks…and my horses grazing in the pasture below me….

Until the day before yesterday, when all ten of them decided to go on a walkabout and ended up at a neighboring farm about a mile from my house…as the crow flies.

Early Tuesday evening, as I was headed toward Franklin, almost sixty miles away, I got a call from my neighbor.  We’ve had a lot of storms and a tree was down on their electric fence.  My little darlings simply tiptoed over it and were enjoying a snack in the neighbor’s hay field, even though two giant fresh rolls of hay were sitting in their own pasture.

She had managed to shoo them into another one of my pastures and she shut the gate.  I was going to have to move them until the fence was fixed, but I decided to wait until the morning to go and get them.  It gets really dark here at night, especially in the woods, and wrangling a bunch of horses on foot in the dark isn’t a smart thing to do.

I never knew what “pitch black” meant until I moved out here.  There are no tall buildings or a lot of street lights and our nearest neighbors are all almost a mile away.  Eventually we got used to how dark it gets and we can find our way around this farm in pitch blackness.  If you know where you are, walking around at night in the dark is amazingly peaceful…just not when you’re leading a herd of horses.

I got up at the crack of dawn and set out to find my little band.  My only mare, Smoker, was waiting by the gate for me with a disgusted look on her face.  The nine boys were nowhere to be found.  She turned and looked over her shoulder toward a really steep hill.

There they were, standing at the top of it, staring down at me.  They must have climbed like commandoes to get there, it was almost a cliff face.  Just great.

I am the alpha female to this herd.  They follow me because I feed them.  It is as simple as that.  I was going to have to climb up there to get them to follow me down.

Smoker walked over and stood next to me.  She whinnied to them and there was a lot of sarcasm in it.  Ordinarily, horses have the sense of a three year old child.  She is one of the rare exceptions.  She has always separated herself from the herd when they have behaved badly.  She is a tattle tale…when I see her standing by the fence and none of the rest of them are around, then I know something is up.

She was a reining horse before I bought her, a Poco Lena mare, which in the quarter horse world, is royalty.  When she first arrived she had a nasty attitude and her ears were always pinned back.  The previous owners had ridden her with a gag bit because she was difficult to handle.   I have used rubber snaffle bits ever since I got my thoroughbred from the track and learned the hard way how NOT to hang on a horse’s mouth.

The first time I used a rubber bit on Smoker, she stood chewing on it for a minute, and then pushed her ears forward and smoothly trotted out.  I threw away the gag bit and we’ve never looked back.  She has had three foals in her years here on my farm, and I was privileged to be in the stall with her when two of them were born.  I missed the third one by a few minutes…I ran to get my kids at school and when I came back, there was a little colt standing at the fence.  Smoker taught her babies early on that I was the boss, and when I had to handle them she would push them up against the stall wall so I could get a hold of them.

One time I walked up to her and thinking it was her baby, she turned to nip him and got me instead.  She had a look of pure horror on her face when she saw it was me she had bitten instead of her colt.  She put her nose on my shoulder and snorted her apology in my ear.

Ordinarily, when I’m gathering up the herd, she’ll walk right next to me, second in command.

Yesterday morning she followed me over to the bottom of the hill, looked up at the rest of them…and turned and headed back to the gate, looking over her shoulder to let me know I was on my own.

Everything is blooming now, and I pulled myself up the hill with some kind of vine that looked suspiciously poisonous.  I guess I’ll find out in a day or two.

When I finally got to the top, they were lined up along the ridge turning their heads away from me like I was invisible.  I started back down the hill, clicking to them.  They wouldn’t follow me.

I climbed up again and they started to move away from me back toward the other farm.  I hadn’t thought to bring some grain with me as an incentive, but like a hillbilly McGuyver, I filled my pocket with stones and shook my jacket.

I can tell you straight up that this would NOT have worked with Smoker.  But it worked with the boys, and they started down the hill behind me.  The plan was not fool proof…they all wanted to be the first one to get to me…so  I had to use trees as a barrier between me and the thirty six legs and nine thousand pounds scrambling in back of me straight down the cliff side.

We made it to the bottom and they followed me through the gate to the main pasture.  The rest would have gone like clockwork if we hadn’t run into the first snake of the season near the creek.  He was laying stretched across the path and looking a little lumpy, like he had just eaten.

The horses came to a dead stop.  He wasn’t moving and neither were they.  I went to look for the longest stick I could find.  I don’t mess around with the snakes here.  Some of them are poisonous and I air on the side of caution and don’t bother introducing myself unless it’s unavoidably necessary.

I kept poking at it with the stick and it only moved enough for me to know it wasn’t dead.  I was considering how fast I could flip it out of the way and run, when Smoker solved the problem for me.  She impatiently marched up to the snake and stepped over it…and it wasn’t in a dainty way.  The snake got the message and slithered out of sight.  The rest of the horses followed her and I left them eating their own hay in my lower pasture.

This morning when I drove out they were down near my front gate…along with my two pigs, five deer and about twenty turkeys…all grazing side by side like a Dark Side Noah’s Ark.

Smoker was laying down and I waited until I was sure she was just resting.  She’s an old lady now and I wonder how many more springs I’ll see her down in the pasture standing with her ears pinned back, waiting for one of the boys to do something stupid and give her an excuse to tattle.

It’s night again…dark and rainy.  The creek will be up in the morning and I wonder if I’ll be able to drive over it.

The rain is drumming steadily on the metal roof of my porch.  There is no wind, so there is not a lot of bite to this storm.  It is springtime in the south and it is about to be the prettiest time of the year here.

Yeah…I miss good bread and pizza…but right now I’m listening to the rain and thinking about how lucky I am….

Day two hundred and eighty eight…some of the best times are the ones that you just happen to find yourself in…

Cynthia Neilson

Today is my birthday.  It would take a cake the size of a kitchen table to fit all the candles that I have earned.  I don’t mind the bonfire…that amount of candlelight after a certain age can be really flattering.

I am what I am…today.  I can be whomever I want to be tomorrow.  That is the beauty of a life that is being lived.  We don’t have to stay the same…every day is new.

While the skin I have today fits a little differently than the skin I had twenty years ago, (my ex-husband would tell you that my mouth is the same size) I’m growing into my age and I try to make it work for me.

When we’re young it seems like we put a lot of time into pleasing other people.  It is almost more important to be liked than it is to be loved.  Popularity is the golden ring and we all grabbed at it or wished we had.

I’ve never won any awards for my tact… I’ve pretty much say always said whatever is on my mind.  I had a lot of playing time during the end game of my marriage answering my own questions and I have to catch myself when my know-it-all personality shows up like a ball hog.

I have said my share of cringe-worthy things, some of which I would have liked to reword.  But I have very few regrets.

I just don’t give a lot of thought to whether or not anyone likes me anymore.  Enough people do, and the ones that I would have to work to win over are simply not worth the effort.

Age has afforded me that luxury…that…and the fact that I can’t remember ten minutes from the next what I say anyway….

Aside from my midlife attention deficit and blurry close-up vision (nature’s facelift) the whole age thing really doesn’t affect me that much.

I don’t ever think about what I can’t or shouldn’t do…it gets in the way of what I still want to accomplish.

I keep moving…

Age can be a hindrance for some women, especially if they find themselves single and over forty-five.  Once they’re past their best child-bearing years, their allure of danger and unpredictability fades away with the scent of their musk.  They lose their perfume.  And no amount of paint will up their curb appeal.

Me…I just keep changing it up…just enough behind the trends to look like I’m on the cutting edge.  I’ve recently added yoga to my workout regiment.  I’m not that good at it…yet.  I have a hard time standing still and I had an intimate encounter with the knotted waistband tie of my workout pants trying to hold one of the poses.

The amount of living in your years is what matters most.

I used to think that past a certain age, it was silly to make a big deal out of birthdays.  But I now believe that all of them should be celebrations.  Age tends to make you appreciate the privilege of growing older.

I don’t ask for things on my birthday.  I’ve never really been a girl who says “I want…”  I’m making an exception today.  As I carve this story into my cyber pyramid, my younger brother is running out of time.  His heart can’t be repaired again and a transplant is no longer an option.  Hospice angels are caring for him and I am certain he is aggravating them as much as he says they aggravate him.

We joked today about him getting to go to the front of the line at Disneyworld in his Jazzychair.  He’s always been so anti-drug and finds hysterical irony in his narcotics collection and morphine drip.

He has a little bit of personal business to finish.

So that’s my birthday wish…let him have this one victory so he can leave knowing he did what he needed to do.  Please.

When I started this pyramid on January 1st,  I made a promise to myself to do five things everyday:

1.  Make my bed.

2.  Don’t litter.

3.  Look up and let go.

4.  Eat cake.

5.  Laugh and cry.

I did all of that today…but most of it was crying from laughing too hard…you have to understand my family…we’re Italian.

Day Two Hundred and Eighty Four…Happy Birthday to me.  I have everything that I want…and a lot that I don’t need.  I am lucky.

Cynthia Neilson

The news lately has been draining like a clogged up sink.  Bits of hope and despair floating in a pool of barely moving stillness…emptying just enough to make room to fill again.  The level stays the same…too many snakes…none of them getting the job done.

It isn’t what we don’t or can’t do…the real question is:  Will we ever be satisfied?

We’ve been treading in stagnant water for a long time now.  Like all of the great civilizations in the past, we make huge strides at warp speed and ride the high tide…flopping in the sand when the water recedes…caught up in man-made seaweed.

Human beings are not hardwired to be happy with things staying the same.  We tinker…then when the wheels are moving too smoothly, we throw a monkey wrench in the spokes…I’ve tossed a few myself…so I speak from experience.

We are all competitive.  It’s the character flaw that inspires us and hinders us.  It moves us forward and holds us back.  It is the purest definition of a necessary evil.  We need it to bring change…sometimes at any cost.

And we’ve got the suffix as our human fail safe.  There is an equivalent in every language.

If you consider life an experiment, then suffixes have become the control…the things that stay the same that we are constantly comparing ourselves to…striving to overcome…wishing to change…hoping to achieve…

Led by General “Est”…followed in battle by Colonel “Er” and his infantry…among them…”ing” and “ed” and “n’t”…wielding them to power the punch and soften the blow.

Biggest…bigger…oldest…older…youngest…younger…thinnest…thinner…fattest…fatter…wisest…wiser…strongest…stronger…weakest…weaker…don’t…can’t…won’t…

For such a competitive civilization, we have very thin skin and we behave like children.  We get disappointed and disillusioned and we always seem surprised when we don’t agree with each other.  And yet the reactions of children are the most honest.  Maybe adults are what we become when we finally figure out that honest is a variable and open to interpretation…and manipulation…and abuse.

The world is complicated and there are no simple answers because the controls in this great experiment called life vary and sometimes madmen are in charge of the laboratories.

We all need to simplify.  We can’t go back to cave days when communications were single syllable grunts of affirmation or denial…but we can be more positive and stand behind what we say and do without feeling the need to soften the blow or pull the punch.

Wish…dream…hope…overcome…strive…achieve…understand…accept…tolerate…

question…wonder…believe…know.

All of the stuff that happens after “I am” is what life is all about.  That is your control.

Day two hundred and seventy six…make it the best day…start with “I am.”

Cynthia Neilson

Spring is the prettiest time of the year in Tennessee.  Everything is blooming and the edges are soft purple, pink, white and green.  Even the dirt smells different…clean and damp…it smells alive.

The green is really green and it’s so sharp against the blue sky that you have to squint your eyes…it’s like biting into a visual lemon.  Things are growing and waking up.  The grass grows inches overnight and when I run in the woods now I’ll have to keep an eye out for things crawling by.

The wildlife on my farm and I have an…understanding…I don’t kill them unless they are trying to kill me or I catch them chewing on my clothes and using my good shoes as outhouses.

I’m not a farmer by birth, so all of the lessons that I have learned have been at my own expense.  I am constantly being tutored by my mistakes.

The ad for this farm read:  Completely surrounded by creeks…turkey and deer abound.

Abound is one of those distracting words…it has a lively lilt…I picture the person saying it holding a cup of tea and a crumpet.

I met up with one of those “abounding” deer in a well-intended rescue mission.  I was on the deck trying to hang a hummingbird feeder.  Hummingbirds are little…but they’re scrappy and very pushy.  Two of them were impatiently buzzing around me like giant bumblebees waiting for the red liquid potion to drip out of the yellow and red flowered feeder.  I wasn’t moving fast enough and they were circling my head and complaining.

I heard a bleating noise from across the field and my dogs raced toward it.  I saw a fawn crawling under the fence with the dogs right behind it.  I was screaming for them to stop and get back to the house.  I knew if they got to the baby deer before I did there would be nothing I could do to stop them from attacking it.  I yelled to my daughter to get the plastic baseball bat and I headed into the woods after the dogs.

I heard running behind me and I looked over my shoulder.  The mother deer was right on my tail…and she did NOT look happy.  You know those old cartoons where steam comes out of the animals noses when they’re really really mad?  It really really happens.

She chased me in a giant circle, in and out of the trees.  On one of my turns out of the woods I saw my daughter standing and laughing, tapping the plastic baseball bat on her knee.  The deer stopped at the same time and we both stared at my daughter for a nano second and then continued running back into and out of the woods in that giant circle.  Trees….Cynthia…trees…Mama Deer…trees…Cynthia….trees…Mama Deer….

The whole time I was yelling “I’m not after your baby…it’s the dogs…go after them…go.” I was waving my hands toward the fence like she could read sign language.

At some point either I slowed down or she did and it seemed like I was chasing her.  The baby bleated again and she turned sharply and raced toward the sound.  I hung on to a tree gasping for breath.  My daughter was laughing hysterically.  I heard one of the dogs yelp and the four of them came crashing through the woods, almost knocking me over as they raced back to the house.

I headed back through the tall grass to my deck to finish hanging the hummingbird feeder.  I had left it sitting on the table and the two attack hummingbirds had already bellied up to the bar and were hovering above the plastic flower feeders helping themselves to the red slippery beverage.  Another one buzzed just above them waiting his turn.

The dogs were laying on the deck with their eyes squeezed tightly shut like they had been there sleeping all along.  Bunch of phonies…one of them even threw in a yawn for effect.

My daughter handed me the plastic bat.

“Hey…I could have been killed.”

“I wish I had a camera…that would have won America’s Funniest Home Videos.”  She was still laughing as she headed into the house.

That was the most the dogs had ever run.  They slept for two days.

I was covered in chiggers and spent the next week trying every backwoods remedy I could get my hands on.  Chiggers and ticks are the insect version of the Hatfields and the McCoys.  I’ve deemed them the official Tennessee pests.  Lye soap works pretty well…and the scars from the burn marks fade after a year or two.  A martini isn’t bad either…taken orally…for medicinal purposes of course.

I am caviar to a tick.  They don’t even phase me anymore.  When I first started venturing out again as a single person, I was in line at Walmart and noticed a really cute guy checking me out.  Wow.

I was just about to give him my best “tuck the hair behind my ear and grin” when he leaned over and told me a tick was crawling up my neck.  Great…just great.

I don’t remember ticks as a kid…and we lived near the woods and spent a lot of time in them even though we weren’t supposed to.  Ticks might be aliens…hey…you never know…

This past Sunday I got up early to go for my trail run.  It was still cool and when I started the car I turned the heater on.  I thought I heard something move inside the dashboard…and just as the noise registered in my brain the heater fan started grinding…rrrrrrrrrrrrrr….uh oh.

I was really hoping that putting two and two together would NOT compute.  I kept sniffing the inside of the car…but it didn’t seem odd…or did it?  You know how that goes…

I’m still trying to make a runner out of my friend Demetra and I swung by to pick her up.  “Listen to this.”  I turned the fan on.  Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“Ya think?  Do you think it smells funny in here?”

“It doesn’t smell good…I don’t know what it smells like.”

I drove home with the windows open and hoped for the best.  That hope was dashed Monday afternoon when I got in the car with my daughter to head into town.

We opened the door…she immediately backed up…”Wow…that smells bad.”

“Yep…a mouse must have died in the air vent…and listen to the fan.”  Before she could stop me I cranked up the air conditioner…

And “Eau de Dead Mouse” wafted out of the vents and into my face and hair.

I’m familiar with that cologne…you might recall the “Great Mouse Wars” that I have written about previously.

This morning I took it to my mechanic Charles…his shop is about fifteen miles from me.  I drove with my head hanging out of the window, pulling it in to keep the snot from freezing on my face…trying to breathe through my mouth just long enough until I could stick my head out of the window again.

I screeched into the lot and jumped out gasping for fresh air.  Charles and another guy came out of the garage, stopping short of the open door of my Jeep.  Both of them put their hands over their mouths and noses.

They sent me off to get some breakfast.  It wasn’t to spare me…it was to spare them.  I didn’t argue.  I had absorbed Eau de Dead Mouse into my skin and hair, and I had a…fragrance.

When I returned he met me outside.  “Wasn’t a mouse after all. It was a rat.”

Oh…that is so much better.

He showed me the little carcass.  He was missing some chunks of hair and I cringed.

“I hope he didn’t suffer.”

Charles stared at me.  “It’s a rat.”

“Even so…I feel badly.”  He didn’t say a word…just handed me my keys.  He had done his best to de-smell my Jeep…he sprayed Pine Sol in all of the vents and I now had my own personal forest of pine tree shaped fresheners placed throughout.

I drove straight home and set off an air freshener bomb inside the car.  After a couple of hours I took it to the car wash to shampoo the carpets and Febreeze the seats.

Under the driver’s seat I found a gnawed up cough drop and a potato chip with tiny little bite marks out of it.  He was a nibbler…his last meal…I felt a pang of guilt as I hit the area with another cloud of Febreeze.

The inside of my Jeep now smells like a tropical forest with a hint of pine and vanilla…a chaser of apples and cinnamon and a touch of clean linen…

and dead rat.

I can’t add any more smells to that stink free stew.  Anything else and it might explode.

I have no more hair follicles in my nose and my taste buds have been seared off.  I’m surprised I still have eyelashes.

I went through the drive-thru at McDonalds to get a Diet Coke…and an invisible cloud of flowery sweet spicy rat stink irradiated out of the window when I rolled it down…like Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown cartoons.

I’ve left the Jeep parked outside with the windows cracked and all the vents open.  I don’t think there is a living thing within ten miles that would want to spend any time inside it…so I am pretty confident there won’t be another guest for a while.

I’ve showered and washed my hair twice.  I’m headed in for another one.  Maybe the third time is the charm.

Day Two Hundred and Sixty Nine…I’m gonna wash that rat right out of my hair…

Cynthia Neilson