williamson county snow day

NEWSFLASH: school opening delayed for 2 hours

But you can't even play in this stuff!

Scenes from my backyard (and front, to be fair) II

Embalmed leaves

If anybody can help me identify what the name of this tree is I will buy you a virtual drink. I can't remember what the leaves look like since they have all fallen off, but what stands out for me is the bark. At first I thought it was covered with fungus, but now I realize that that is how it's supposed to be (I hope to God it is, for the sake of the tree!). It is covered in what looks like stacks of misshapen coins. Normally I would look this up myself, but my field guide to trees mildewed while sitting in storage here and it smelled too bad to save, and I have yet to buy another one (one more innocent victim of the move, including many daddy long-legs that made the trip down in boxes).

A pseudo-graveyard, but the only thing really dead here is my will to want to walk through this area in the summertime, down by the creek, where vines of poison ivy cover the ground

Sweetgum balls, which give the tree an interesting profile in the winter. And that is about all the good I can say about them!

Holly and berries. I never realized that this evergreen tree didn't like growing in the North. It seems so northern!

One of the few Tennessee snowmen in existence today. Two minutes after building him he was already beginning to lean backwards.

The aforementioned stream. During the summer it was pretty dry and you could see most of the creek bed. My next-door neighbor has an irrigation pump thingy that sucks up the water for his grass, and I have a theory that he was contributing to our drought. I was going to take some of the stones from the bottom for my garden path in order to give it a natural look, but I had to wait for the autumn to arrive so that the poison ivy would die off. Go figure. It is now a slippery, deep, rushing river. I guess that's what husbands are for--to risk their lives for the sake of the beauty of the house.

what is it about frozen water that is so nostalgic?

It is snowing all around Nashville tonight! AOL news described it as "Rare Snowfall Blankets South." Now I feel like Tennessee is home, or at least my home away from home.

I have every intention of playing in the snow with my kids in the morning before it all melts away. In Tennessee, you cannot count on keeping something like this around for more than a half day, so you need to act quickly.

I'm just so thankful that I have children to share it with. During my college days in Illinois, I used to take my sled to a small hill tucked away within the forest preserve, where I wouldn't easily be spotted by passing cars, and traipse up and down until either my legs gave out or my toes went numb. My oldest daughter was in early elementary school at the time, and she still doesn't know about my winter excursions. It is one of my silly secrets.

I'm wondering what I will do when my two youngest are grown. I very well cannot go out into my front yard and make snow angels alone. I guess that gives me one good reason to look forward to becoming a grandmother someday.

central Indiana sunset on the fly

Driving home from our short weekend trip to Illinois, I caught the end of the day just in time to snap these photos. Rolled the passenger window down--kids screaming in the back "we're cold!"--had to balance the camera on the door at 70 m.p.h. without losing it--hands going numb--kids still yelling for me to hurry up. Pity the life of an amateur photographer's family.

Christkindlmarket in Chicago 2008

The Daley Plaza, looking down Washington Boulevard

Horse and carriage on Washington Blvd.

At sunset, the millions of white lights adorning the trees in Daley Plaza begin to appear

One of the many food stands--this one sold flaky strudel filled with hot fruit or cheese. Danke schon--bitte!

Enjoying some warm gluhwein

Despite all the delicious food around the market, the pigeons are more interested in staying warm!

Wheelchairs and strollers--a good way to cut through the crowds

Everyone is dressed for the occasion--with temperatures in the teens and low 20's--and no one is complaining about the cold (except us "Tennesseans")!

the beauty of brown

We drove to Illinois today on what is henceforth to be called the "Annual Christmas Pilgrimage to the Frozen Homeland." The green melted away quickly as we proceeded north up through the central part of the state, from plentiful cedar trees lining I-65 to Japanese honeysuckle in its last throes of life clinging to fences.

Skeletons of goldenrods, pampas grass and other common prairie plants, dried leaves suspended on oak trees, remnants of cornstalks and soybean fields, piles of branches collected from summer storms, reeds and solitary shrubs in the median strips, a pine split in half--all contrasted with the occasional man-made brown of local attraction signs along the highway.

This was the aspect of the trip to Illinois that I had dreaded: the drive up north, to slowly watch the landscape become more dried and barren. Miles of nothing but houses, farms and graineries jutting up from brown. Worried that I might come to realize that I was glad to be living away from it, far away south, nestled in Tennessee.

For the first time, after all the years of living in Illinois, I noticed the tones of winter outside of the spectrum of snow colors (white, of course, but we mustn't forget yellow and black). Olive green, silver, and all the shades of brown that you can find in a stand of trees and in the fields lining the highway--coffee bean, burnt sienna, amber, chestnut, tan, rust, chocolate, sepia, auburn. I have never been deferent to brown, but moving away from Illinois has given me a third eye to be able to see beauty in a landscape that I once dismissed as ugly.

It must be possible to love two places and call them home, and have people agree that you belong to both of them and they belong to you. To admit that you love one and still not betray the other.

Thanksgiving in the ER

This was last night's prevailing scenario in the ER:

You visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday and sit down to dinner together. The Southern cooking is so good!--salt cornbread, turnip greens, ham, stuffing, a variety of casseroles including hashbrown, squash and the ubiquitous God-forsaken green bean casserole that always turns up on this day, 4 different types of chocolate cake--and you just can't get enough of it.

You begin to have abdominal pain, probably caused by your attempt to sample all the fixin's and go back for seconds. Still, you continue to indulge yourself. After all, how often do you get to eat like this and not feel guilty?

The cramping begins. You run to the bathroom and just make it in time to hurl all your hard work into the toilet. You no longer feel as if you've overeaten, but that bitter bile taste in your mouth sure doesn't resemble the cranberry sauce you just had. Back to the table after cleaning up. After all, you don't get to see these people very often.

But your GI system doesn't care about your social life. Everyone can hear your intestines writhing as you dramatically rush into the bathroom and make a split-second decision as to which end should kiss the bowl first.

Your family is concerned. They tell you that you should go to the ER. After all, you could get dehydrated.

The next thing you know you are lying on a cot with a bright fluorescent light over your head and I am sitting on a chair beside you starting an IV. Your significant other is holding your hand. You really do feel much better after puking up the last of those heavy sour cream-laden mashed potatoes, but hey, what the hell--you tell me that your pain is an 8 out of 10 anyways.

I draw your blood. You get a bag of IV fluids. I nag you for a urine sample for an hour until you finally decide to drag yourself up and hobble to the bathroom. You get some Dilaudid. It knocks you out for an hour or two so that I don't have to listen to your whining about how long this is taking. Your labs come back normal. I take your IV out and you wince as the tape is being removed. I say sorry, it's worse on men with all the arm hair. You get your discharge papers that say "return to the ER if symptoms worsen." You and I both know they won't.

Bottom line: You eat too much food, you get sick.

early November photos

The colors were still changing in early November. Today it was in the 60's! Hard to believe that it is Thanksgiving tomorrow. The air is so fresh when you step outside, the sun so bright. It reminds me of bacon frying in a pan. I think that bacon is the official state smell, judging from the fact that when you stop at the welcome center on the Kentucky/Tennessee border, bacon is the prevailing aroma in the air; either that or it is ham. This must be the tourism department's surreptitious method to get people to stay for awhile.

Happy Birthday little buddy. I love you.

My first award!

I just received an award for my blog from Nash Deville at A Yankee in Tennessee, a fellow northerner just trying to get by in the south. Thanks Nash--and to everyone who reads this--whether you agree with my viewpoint or not. I must also give a shout out to Tennessee and her interesting people for providing me with the inspiration to create this blog.

“Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is the scribbling child in a grown-up body, wondering if anyone is listening.”

~Herbert Gold, Elder Statesman of The Beat Generation

imaginary surrender--not!

Alright,

Lets just pretend for a moment that I'm starting to like it here. That even though I say I miss the Chicago winters and all the complaints about everything that Northerners tend to have (because they spend too much time indoors together during the winter), I really don't miss them very much.

That I don't feel like a hell-bound heathen among all the churchgoing people.

That the water has not given me what my beautician aptly described as "Your Tennessee Hair" A.K.A. straw, and the southern change in latitude is not bringing me one step closer to discovering a subtle but fatal spot of malignant melanoma.

That the word "ya'll" slips forth from my lips, and I welcome it as "learning the dialect."

That the wolf spider I let stay alive the first time I discovered it (because it is a natural predator of the brown recluse) was not found residing on my daughter's pillow the other morning and didn't try to climb into her mouth, causing her to vomit all over herself.


That I drive the appropriate 15 m.p.h. speed limit in school zones, and do not get reprimanded by overzealous crossing-guards with crisp white gloves when they see my Chicago Bears plate on the front of the car.

That blondes do not outnumber the brunettes here. God save the redheads like myself.

That I look good in a spaghetti-strap sundress, a main wardrobe staple of the female locals May through September (especially at football games); unlike in Chicago, where dresses are mainly worn to church, weddings, and funerals, A.K.A. to church.

That I finally stop saying "pop" when referring to Sprite and instead call it "soda." Wait, I mean "coke."

That I come to accept the term "toboggan" to mean a hat with earflaps, rather than a sled-like device that you use to have fun with in the snow, because winter is bad, bad, bad.

While it's been fun to make fun of Tennessee (which I really don't think I've done all THAT much), maybe I should change the theme of this blog a little. Write more about family? Get all bitchy like all those SAHM blogs I've glanced at? Nah, my husband hears enough of that. Work? No, composing a novel for that subject (stay tuned). Friends? Don't have many here, and the ones that I do have are coworkers anyways.

Oh well, sorry Tennessee.

going outside

I have never seen this many people walking in the Civil War park, so many elderly. It is a beautiful day, sunny, in the high 70's. But there have been many days like this, and I have been the only one out there. In passing, people manage to muster a weak, insincere smile, as if they have lost a dear relative. Maybe this is a way of healing from the disappointment. Maybe the country going Democratic has brought them back to their roots with nature. Or maybe they are trying to reconnect with the past, a past that they feel is gone forever. Thankfully, it is.

after all is said and done

The sun has still risen in Williamson County this morning. The birds have not distinguished between this day and the last; they are busily going about their task of preparing for the winter, heeding the command of the trees decked out in stately autumn robes. The sun makes its way through a thicket of shrubs, comes to rest on a patch that becomes transformed into a glowing orb of yellow light that is brighter than anything seen on a summer dawn.

The sun has still risen in the South, shining over the red pool of lifeblood that courses itself up through the center of the country. This is a place that I have come to know as a welcomed guest during the past year and a half. Despite our differences, we have embraced eachother; sometimes reluctantly, but with the underlying understanding that we are, outside of any ideological disagreements that are historically North/South, fellow Americans.

The political yard signs are slowly disappearing into dusty garages. I can't help but cherish the pride I had last night for my native city of Chicago as she welcomed a new era in our country, yet I also realize a sort of empathetic sadness for these people here, who I now have a better, less biased understanding of, for their sense of hopelessness in the midst of a new consciousness of hope that has transpired over the past few months, culminated in the celebration at Grant Park last night.

But enough of the sentimentalities for now. My writing is tainted too much by them, and it is easy to be condescendingly sentimental when you are on the winning side of an issue. A simple task to say "Let us move forward together as a country" when you are not stinging from loss.

After living in Germany for over two years, I realized that the best way to overcome fear and misinformation about some things in life is to educate oneself about the other humans sharing this planet. "Love your neighbor" is a maxim that we should all aspire to live by, but "Embrace those with whom you have little understanding" is what we should all be striving for at this point in our history. Our country depends on it.

Early November--They're Back!

The fetid aroma of stinkbugs, or should I say Asian ladybugs, lingers in the cool dry air. These orange and black-spotted ladybug imposters whisk by me carelessly, occasionally slamming into the side of my face. As I bend down to examine a large mushroom, one lands on my arm. I knock it off and it unapologetically releases its fumes.

When we lived in Illinois, these nuisances would make their grand appearance on warm sunny days in October after the corn and soybean fields had been cut down, where they must have been lying in wait. There aren't many cornfields here due to the karst topography (in other words, rocky soil), so I have no idea where they've been hiding all summer.

I left a container of potatoes sitting on the kitchen table, engrossed in my blogging, and when I went back to put them away there was a stinkbug sitting on top. I love how they sound when they hit the floor.

Not to get on an Asian soapbox, but the Japanese honeysuckle is also thriving this time of year. While frost has claimed many shrubs, including my crepe myrtles, this invasive vine is still dark green.

For those of you from the north who've never heard of this, it bears a lovely-scented yellow and white flower that you can suck the juice out of. It smells so good that I was tempted to let it run wild in the burning bush shrub growing near my front door, pictured above. Now I've just decided to wait for the red leaves to drop so that I can search and follow each vine down to their shallow roots and pull them up. It is so evil and unlike me to kill a plant (other than a houseplant), but if I don't do it now, my house will be covered head to toe in honeysuckle vine, and like a scene from Jumanji, we'll have to hack our way out of the door.

Franklin Pumpkinfest 2008

Spiderman's alter ego seems to have another alter ego. Wonder what Batgirl is thinking...

Celebrities walking the square--guess who?

Balloon animals gone wild

sepsis of the profession

I recently discovered this fascinating line in The Emerald, a short story by Donald Barthelme. Being a critical care nurse, I could not help but be drawn to it.

For those of you not in the medical field, sepsis is a life-threatening full body reaction to an infection in the blood. That's a very simplified definition.

The dialogue contains a journalist, Lily, who is filled with disbelief at the sight of a 7,035 carat emerald speaking to her. She is told that disbelief is the sepsis of her profession. It hampers inquisitiveness. It kills the news story.

Indifference is the sepsis that plagues the nursing profession. How many times have I heard "I'm just here for the paycheck," or "I just do my 12 hours and go home?"

I guess it's because so many nurses have let go of the polished-white nursing shoe attitude that causes them to spring out of school proclaiming "I'm going to help someone!"

After several occasions of being threatened with a full airborne urinal, one can only muster so much patience and good-natured caring attitudes.

Maybe it is indifference that enables us to carry on with the job, though. To learn to not care about so many insignificant little things, to not take so many words to heart, to let them go in one ear and out the other. To be able to go home, sit down with a bowl of ice cream in front of the TV, open a book, read about someone else's life, and forget about the day where you successfully fended off an old lady who simultaneously wanted to bite you and get her pants off so that she could play tug of war with her foley catheter.

on the road with history

Sometimes I wonder if I am being too hypervigilant when it comes to Tennessee drivers. But the other day I spotted an unusual sight that deserved mention. The strangest thing about the scene was that nobody else seemed to think it was strange.

A woman pulls out of a fast food restaurant in a red sedan, maybe a Honda or Toyota. She was black, but I will give her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't from this country.

Why will I do that? Because she had a Confederate flag plate on the front of her car!

It was almost like I had entered some alternate universe.

Perhaps she is not a student of history. Could it be that she is trying to fit into her new homeland by using a symbol that she has frequently seen? Maybe she thinks the Confederate flag is trendy.

That's almost as bad as what I have been up to lately--a Northerner, innocently carpooling to work with a guy who sports a "Sons of Confederate Veterans" license plate. Hypocrite am I? No. Broke from gas prices? You betcha.

Sometimes you just gotta sell out to survive.

Chattanooga doo doo

The "trained naturalist." He is probably thinking "Why do they keep letting little kids on this boat? Are we that strapped for cash?"

Daddy and the girl face eachother down

Dark green kudzu grows unchecked near the shore of the Tennessee river. It seems impervious to the cold temperatures.

An oxymoron

Development on the banks of the river

The Tennessee aquarium in Chattanooga

The woman in the above photo is not a drug overdose. She is still breathing, but barely. This poor tired soul is the personification of the boat ride we took yesterday down the Tennessee River gorge in Chattanooga.

The worst part about taking a trip is waiting for it to start. Finally, after 15 minutes of holding down, cajoling, and bribing the 2-year-old, we were on our way.

Our first stop was to the sewage unloading dock, where the trained naturalist who narrated our cruise explained that the previous passengers had unloaded a bit too much themselves.

Ten more minutes of painful waiting, this time worrying that the little girl would make a break for the rear (no pun intended) of the boat and get caught up in the pumping hose while the toilets were being emptied.

Finally, we were on our way. We cruised for about 10 minutes, came to an abrupt stop, and tarried along for the next 2 hours looking at trees and hills.

Now, for those of you who follow or who have even taken a cursory glance at my blog, you know how much I am enamored by trees. However, the two-year-old does not yet share my views on nature.

The trained naturalist was quite well-informed. Unfortunately, I didn't catch a single sentence of the spiel, and he spoke for the entire 2 hours. Every so often I would hear "eagle," "old tale," "mermaid," or something along the lines of what you would expect to hear on a cruise like that.

Caught a few good photos in-between struggling with the girl to keep her from flinging herself overboard.

This is what family memories are made of.