Welcome home autumn! It's about time!

I must admit that, while I am always pleased to kick summer out the door, this year I am truly worshipping at fall's feet.  What a horrid, horrid summer!  Deadly drought, wildfires, not one blessed summer tomato to make it worthwhile and my favorite flip-flops broke early on.

So now, I can enjoy the approaching fall and I can assure any doubters that I am well and good enjoying it!  I even enjoy stumbling outdoors in the pre-dawn hours to refill the dog's water trough.  It's crisp, quiet and still at that hour and I sometimes linger a bit before coming back indoors to send him to his day.

A few moments ago, I was outside with him and, while he chased old gnawed-on tennis balls, I decided to officially say good-bye to the garden that never was.  Between the lack of water, oppressive heat and assaults by a dog, that poor garden never had a chance.  It was so pretty back in the spring when squash, zucchini and tomato plants were installed and there were some hopes that it would make it, but not one blessed thing survived that plot of land.

So, it had become time (actually, it was time months ago) to slip the tomato cages out of the ground and store them away for next spring.  The dog was chasing tennis balls and suddenly I heard the sound of the carillon from the Methodist church in town.

In the cool autumn air, the pure, simple notes were sounding out a hymn --one whose name is long forgotten to me although I could still hum along--and those notes were floating out over the whole town.

That's a nice fall evening indeed.

The power of home and soup

While I was reading the Dallas Morning News recently, I ran across an article about Maya Angelou. I've never been a huge fan of Angelou's but the article tied her writing and culinary skills together. That's obviously because she's hawking a cookbook.

But one of the quotes really resonated with me. The article described Angelou returning home after being away for several days on a book tour. According to the article, the first thing she did on arriving home was to get in the kitchen and saute onions, celery and garlic in preparation of making a soup.

"If you live alone and have been away a week or more, the house can be as aloof as a pet. You don't feel the warmth of it embracing you," Angelou is quoted as saying. "The best thing to do is start a soup. As the aromas go down the halls, up the steps and around into the bedrooms and into the dining room, it's as if the house says, 'OK, she's back'."

Now, the last thing I usually want to do after coming back home from a trip is to go to work in the kitchen. But the feeling Angelou expresses is very familiar.

I returned recently from a week-long business trip and was shocked at how alien my home felt. Part of that, I know, was that my best cat ever had died while I was gone. Even though her death was expected, it still felt like my house was saying, "You don't belong here right now."

My home was full of strange smells, not usual to it's normal daily life. It had been intruded on by several different people who had helped take care of it and it's animal residents. Things were in odd places, dirt was tracked everywhere and it felt like I had lost my place in my own home.

For a week, I cleaned and refreshed the things of my home and I loved and reassured the animals. And yet, my house was still turning it's back on me.

Finally, a full week after returning, I felt the need for something warm and nourishing for dinner. I boiled a chicken, simmered it in stock, added some biscuits, carrots and celery and there was my soup.

Suddenly, my house was mine again and was welcoming me back home.

Maybe Maya Angelou knows her business after all.

Dear England 2..........

An ongoing dialogue with and about the UK.

Logic tells you that we, as former Brits long ago, should have multiple ties to our several-times-removed cousins and that one of those ties would be our language.

Well, you'd be bloody wrong.

I don't know what sailing across the ocean did to the way we talk but it's so far removed from the Mother Tongue as to be almost a completely different thing entirely. And what's annoying is that, in some ways, the Brits have a much more colorful range of expressions (for the stiff, unemotional souls they can be).

I'd love to adopt some of those expressions but my Texas friends would give me the kind of look that would fry ants on a rock. Texans aren't much for what they consider high-falutin' ways as it is and an East Texas girl spouting British-isms would not be accepted. I might get my "ya'll" privileges taken away.

Brits have a fondness for the sarcasm I love so much and so my favorite UK expression relates to that. Nowhere in the American lexicon is a term so perfect and so relevant as the British-ism "taking the piss". It has nothing to do with urination (unless you want to count the pouring down of sarcastic wit) but has everything to do with twisting a situation back around on someone. For a very simplistic definition, let's say you come in from a soaking rain and I tell you how lovely you look. Well, that's taking the piss--again, in an extremely simplistic illustration. It's just plain, simple, lovely sarcasm.

And we've got no one word or term that comes even close to meaning the same thing. "Kidding" is too soft, too juvenile. "Joking" doesn't apply and we shan't even discuss "joshing".

I love the term car park for parking lot just because it sounds more elegant somehow...less humble and mundane. I think it's delightful when something "comes over a treat" or, rather, turns out well. There are also "poncey" and "posh". I have yet to clarify precisely each of the terms but I enjoy the perceived meanings I've chosen for them. And I'm pretty sure I like for things to be posh even though it seems to be frowned upon.

Of course, I realized my most ambitious linguistic desire on my last trip to England. I couldn't help but stand out with my Texas-cum-Southern accent and yet I wanted so much to appear as if I knew what I was doing. I dined lavishly on a pub Sunday roast and readied myself for the moment of ordering a dessert (or a pudding, if I were actually being correct). The waiter asked what I'd like and I looked him straight in the eyes. In my most serious tone, I said clearly, "Spotted dick please."

Then I spoiled it when I giggled.

Mmmmm.....the smell of candidate sweat fills the spring air

I love politics.

Well, let me clarify. I love local politics…not the loud, national, multi-million dollar advertising kind of politics.

I love county races where the guy running for judge may have washed your car when he was a kid or you may have had a drink at a party with the fellow trying to be the next county commissioner.

But most of all—more than anything—I love local, in-town, at home politics.

We’re currently embroiled in election season for city and school board candidates and the process brings me massive joy and anger both.

Knowing that there are people interested enough in an issue, in their town, in their children’s education, to give up their time to campaign is wondrous to me. These are people willing to stand up in front of friends and neighbors and say “I want you to want me enough to get up on a lovely Saturday and spend, oh, maybe 30 minutes going to vote for me. I want you to trust me enough to believe I might not make things even worse than they already are. I want you to think I’m smart enough to do this.”

How much more dangerous to one’s ego can anything be?

And, while they might not really be aware of it yet, they aren’t just pledging to show up for meetings and stay awake during every boring thing that must be discussed. They are also promising to answer the phone when Joe down the road has a pot hole in his street and is really mad about it. They’re saying they’ll take time in the grocery store to listen to a teacher’s concerns about something at the school.

Well, that’s what the best ones are promising anyway.

What makes me angry is a candidate who has an agenda with one item on it—a candidate who’s out to get someone or who wants their kid to be able to wear his hair in a green Mohawk or who thinks he can throw some business to a friend.

I ran for city council once myself because it was something I had always wanted to do.

Spending years as an editor writing about the workings of the city (and complaining loudly in print about how badly it was being handled), I got first-hand exposure to the process but I didn’t feel like I could do my job and be a city councilman too. When, finally, I was no longer an editor, I had no more such conflicts and I had the time. So I put my name down.

I felt like so many people knew me and what I stood for that, if they agreed, they’d vote for me. And I made no effort at campaigning or selling myself. Well, they either didn’t agree or they didn’t care.

I lost.

Thankfully, I wasn’t the lowest one on the list of results but I was pretty close to the bottom. And it made me realize how hard it all is—not that I was delusional enough to think it was easy but I just hadn’t been smacked hard enough by the actual difficulty of asking people to trust you to do the right thing.

So now I’m watching this year’s crop of hopeful candidates. There’s a conflict brewing on the school board; the city, as usual, doesn’t draw enough strong, intelligent people and there is a wet/dry election lurking on the ballot (picture ominous clouds overhead, with Satan and a pitchfork here).

It will be a fun election. I’m hoping for the best.

Dear England.....

The advent and ascension of the internet in my life has been both a blessing and a curse. It gobbles my time as I find more and more new, fun places to wander and it has introduced me to people around the world who have become “virtual friends”. Because I am an obsessive Anglophile, I tend to sniff around the British corner of the web more than any one other place. Thus we sometimes discuss the differences between being a U.S. citizen and living in England.

I just made myself a cup of tea. Somehow, it leaves a lot to be desired. My favorite mug here at the office, a whirl in the microwave and….plop. In goes a dusty dry bag of cinnamon and orange tea. That’s a far cry from the luscious equivalent that is a staple in Britain.

In England, you couldn’t escape a good cup of tea if you tried. Every dining establishment, from large to small, presents you with a charming pot of some sort that has been warmed and filled with hot water. The tea bag is swimming around happily inside and, in a few minutes, it is steeped to perfection.

Room temperature milk is poured into a cup, the tea is poured over and, in my case, sugar is stirred in enthusiastically.

For some reason, Americans (at least the Texas variety) just don’t get tea. Using milk with tea is looked on as incredibly strange. That’s partly because Americans, if they touch hot tea at all, are big on weirdly flavored teas: apricot, cinnamon, orange, almond, cherry….on and on. Most people don’t seem to understand that there’s nothing more delightful than a good strong, black India tea.

They like to plunk a big wedge of lemon in their tea and most men think they can’t touch it at all. Texas men like their coffee—hot and black—and assume that, if they were ever forced into drinking tea, they would have to extend their pinky finger just so.

Yet, if you drop some ice into that very same tea, you have all of us clamoring to get to it. Iced tea is a staple. It’s like mother’s milk and we can barely make it through a day, much less a meal, without a big, shimmeringly cold, tooth-achingly sweet glass of it. I’ll admit to needing—not just wanting—it when driving a long distance or at the office during an afternoon.

It doesn’t make any difference what the weather is—iced tea is a requirement all year round.

And I will admit to longing for iced tea in England. But I never had the nerve to drop the rare British ice cube into any tea while confronted with those stiff upper lips. It just wouldn’t have been proper!

And here goes....

I have now discovered something more intimidating than a blank sheet of paper.

Yes, a blank spot on a blog.

After all, how incredibly self-serving is a blog anyway? I've seen some that will come back to haunt the owners in years to come (or at least I hope they do) and I really would like to avoid that kind of albatross. Although, in a few years, the internet will be so full of garbage that even my silly blog will have ceased to have even the tiniest bit of relevance. As if it has any relevance now!

During my 11 years as a newspaper editor, I managed to stay pretty neutral and relatively obscure as a person. Of course, some of the readers I offended during that time would argue the point. But, other than my newspaper columns, I thought I did fairly well with objectivity. Of course, given the fact that I am actually human, it's impossible to be totally successful in that regard.

I was always shocked when someone would remark on or quote one of my columns. Those were more personal than the articles I wrote and I think I really believed no one saw them. I embarrassed my family in them, abused my friends and tortured my pets. Fortunately, the animals didn't have a clue. But people remembered the columns for some reason.

The main thing I miss about newspaper work is that feeling of being in the loop, of knowing what's going on everywhere at almost every moment. Now it seems as if I have blinders on and have no concept of what's going on around me. I avoid national news to a large extent because I'm tired of people trying to scare me to death. I don't seek out regional news because it's still usually too far away to affect me. But I miss good old community news. And there just doesn't seem to be a source for it anymore.

So, not that it really relates to this train of thought, I've decided to take up writing again. I'm working toward developing a free-lance career and, while I won't know any more about local news, I might get to feel like I'm in a loop again. A loop of some sort. So, hang on and we'll see how that goes.