Month: October 2014

A few years ago I ordered some tea as a gift for a friend and since then every month I receive the latest catalog and a free sample from The Republic of Tea.  Tea is a benign substance that appears happy to accommodate every odd fruit, vegetable, herb and flavor known to man.  In all the months of free samples I have yet to encounter one that is just tea. I must admit to some guilt in this area because my tea of choice is Earl Grey, which is black tea infused with oil of bergamot.  And no, despite all the health advisos, I do not drink green tea because it tastes like something you should not be drinking…nuff said.

October, the grandest of all the months of the year, not least because it is my birth month, seems to have been designated ‘pumpkin month’ resulting in every conceivable food being infused and combined with pumpkin or its flavor, natural and not.

This month’s tea sample was pumpkin spice and I thought I’d give it a whirl, or rather a steep. What a waste of good water.  I tried to like it. I tried to drink it. I was unsuccessful on both counts.

Then there is that bastion of bad coffee, whose beverage offerings can only be compared to Jim Jones’ kool-aid. They seem to have a count-down to the day you can obtain their pumpkin flavored potions.

Scroll around the interwebz this month and you will discover that pumpkin and its perceived flavor has been added to anything and everything even remotely edible, drinkable and smellable.

I like pumpkins. Cunningly carved or prettily painted. They are cute. They are festive. They are fun. But aside from pie – Stop the pumpkin madness.

I’ve never quite understood what they mean when they say “Live each day as if it is your last” I would like to spend the last day of my life stuffing my face with jelly donuts and having hot jungle monkey sex.  The last day of my life will probably be spent in a hospital bed, pooping in a diaper and gasping for breath.  Truth to tell I’d rather not spend each day doing either of those things…enticing as the first may seem.

My husband has an insanely high IQ. He is a high school drop-out (the high school he dropped out of was Boston Latin and he left because he was bored) who took the LSAT on a whim, studied for it by reading through the study guide they provide, while on a bus from Burlington VT to Boston, MA, made it to the test site barely on time and then scored in the 98th percentile.   On the other hand he needs detailed instructions on how to boil water.

One of the side effects of anti-depressants is suicidal thoughts.  At least you will die happy.

It seems silly to me but here I am, almost 68, somewhat of a gimp, living pretty much as a recluse and I have never been happier in my whole life. Joy is an every day thing in my world.

I was reading Vanilla’s post about how he finds certain plants a bit off putting. It started me thinking about my own relationships with flowers and plants, likes and dislikes and how I got this way. Which of course led to my mother, and I was thinking of writing about her preferences and whether mine, which mirror hers, are just part of shared DNA or whether they were acquired through osmosis.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my mother – she was/is not a nice person. Whether she was born that way or her life made her that way, I do not know. I don’t think she had a very nice or happy life and she seemed to want to pass that on. She certainly made my life a misery even after I walked out of hers after 48 years. Actually she did the walking, I just never bothered to go after her.  But the effects of her ‘nuture’ still bedevil me at times.

So this while thinking about floral preferences and from there perfume preferences, I got a little creeped out about whether it was nature or nurture, our similarities. I don’t want to be anything like her. I don’t want to follow her footsteps through hell, neither the one she occupies nor the one she visited upon other people.

As I was sitting down to type up this post, which was going to be more about flowers than mothers, she was still on mind. Memories of her still pricking my brain, upsetting my soul.  I don’t do this often, if ever, if at all.

Then my eyes drifted to the top of my computer screen and today’s date caught my eye. October 1st – my mother’s birthday. If she is still alive she is 98.

If she is still alive it’s because neither Heaven nor Hell wants her.