Blah, blah blah, practicing cursive. Sometimes cursing. Musing, venting, observing, and occasionally writing stories. Perfecting comma placement.

On a good day, I take my coffee to the back porch rocking chair and let the words flow, distracting myself from the day ahead, the number on the bathroom scale, the unbearable headlines, and my stagnant dumbells.

This is my “Me” time, filling pages with ink I buy off Amazon. It’s a good way, a friend reads somewhere, to stave off dementia. Something about the hand-eye-brain connection that differs from fingers on a keyboard.

On a not so good day, I don’t have or take the time to sit on the back porch with paper and pen. When this notebook is full I’ll add it to the stack of already-full notebooks, building my tower of words one inch at a time.

I first heard about this relatively new park four years ago from my friend, Amy. She also wonders if Cane Creek might be an epicneter of unusually good weather.

We always meet in the parking lot where we admire the forest green trees against that piercing blue sky with the white white clouds. I’m sure I’ve told her how some day I’m going to crochet an afghan in these colors because it’s the thing I usually say in situations like this.

After Cane Creek built the Monadnock Lookout Tower, Amy said, “Let’s go!” so we picked a date in May.

We were halfway up the 80-foot tower when Amy turned and told me that she has an uneasy relationship with heights. However, she pushed ahead and 70 steps later Amy was standing on top.

I scanned the horizon, trying to pick out landmarks and vowed to bring my camera with the big lens next time.

Six weeks later I returned with Emma, who when I told her about the tower, had said, “Let’s do it.” Once again, it was a perfectly crisp, dry morning. I swear this is some kind of Alamance County Park juju.

Emma and I head up the trail at what I think is a respectable pace until we are passed by a jogger, a thin woman who shouts over her shoulder, “Therapy!” in response to my, “You go!”

Emma confesses that she isn’t comfortable with heights, so I suggest she go first like Amy did in order to strike her own pace. “The platforms are the worst,” she says. “I don’t like how you can see through them.”

I consider this while staring through the metal grid, wondering what are the chances that two of my friends might express a desire to climb something that gives them the heebie jeebies.

I recently learned about the Visual Cliff experiments from the ’60s in which babies who would crawl across a platform to reach their mothers, refused when that platform was made of plexiglass. The hypothesis being that humans are hardwired to avoid the air space between trees lest we fall to our deaths.

My five brothers and I are all goats—we’ll climb anything—and I can’t wait to bring them here. Although they may not enjoy it as much as the towers they have to squeeze through locked gates to climb, those danger boys, now in their 60s and 70s.

Emma and I reach the big platform at the top with its sturdy rails and magnificent view, a giant American flag clapping for our triumph, and a nice breeze to wick away the sweat of our efforts.

I point out the nuclear plant some 40 miles to the south. I admire Emma’s courage, admire her for boldly pushing herself upwards to stand here in the breeze looking down into the overstory. She isn’t even holding on to the railing.

I point to the north, to a cluster of man-made towers and Emma says, “I think that’s Durham.”

After we’ve had our fill of thrill, we walk back down and take turns posing with the warning sign at the bottom. To wit:

Climb at your own risk. Falls from the tower may result in death or serious injury.
Tower may be used during park hours of operation only.
Do not climb on or lean over railing.
Visitors under the age of 18 cannot climb the tower without being accompanied by an adult.
Any visitors with health issues should be supervised while on the tower.
Park management reserves the right to close the tower at any time without notice.

We are nearly back to the lot when our jogger reappears. “Therapy!” I shout, and she laughs. “It beats housework!”

We stop to admire the way the sun is highlighting flora and fauna on the bank of a thin creek and crouch beside the wooden bridge to watch a half dozen damselflies flirt above the rocks.

I point out some chanterelles—Emma’s first—and she grows as excited as she did with the blueberries we’d been seeing along the trail. “We have to go foraging sometime!”

By the time we reach our cars, I am infused with friendship, endorphins, and hope. What a great use of tax dollars! What a great Country! This sure beats war and detention centers, ballrooms and arches. If Alamance County can do this, maybe the old U. S. of A. isn’t entirely broken.

We roll down the sheet and the light patchwork quilt Bob had made for us in Ghana, and turn towards each other. It’s sheet-washing day, Saturday, so we leave the bed unmade when we get up. I start undressing pillows while Bob goes into the kitchen to heat up our coffee. We open the windows and discover an unexpectedly cool day. 58°.

We’ve seen 101° this month and discovered that 92° is almost refreshing as long as the humidity is low. A full body reset. Seems we are ready for summer.

I have mixed feelings about the solstice. I don’t want the days to get shorter. Well, a little shorter might be good. At 14 1/2 hours, they drag on more than I’d like.

Can’t they just stay the same? That’s what I love about the tropics, I tell anyone who asks. I love the predictability of a twelve-hour day. I’m not into roller coasters.

“Take it one day at a time,” Bob says when I bring it up. “Be here now.” He’s been doing a lot of meditating, been reading about mindfulness and non-duality. He is very chill these days, extremely patient, and I am learning from his good example.

As retirees, we have the luxury of time. No need to stress unless we cram our calendars, which we tend not to do. Time is fertile ground for mindfulness. I will savor my early morning goosebumps without dreading the sweaty summer afternoons ahead. We can afford to be chill. No need to sweat that which has passed or has yet to pass.

Another do-over. The clumped clay rubble where the old propane tank used to live will slowly become a soft, pain-free place for bare feet.

You wonder why it took so long to do something about the west side of the house. For years, you diligently blasted the sparse weeds along the brick skirting with your electric trimmer, telling yourself, “Nothing wants to grow here in the shade of the fig,” without a thought to amending the soil or sprinkling seed.

Last year, masons repaired the wall, making everything worse, so that only the hardiest weeds took root. You clicked your tongue and hurried by on your way to the laundry line or to inspect the chestnut trees for Japanese beetles.

And then a few months ago, it got even uglier when you changed propane vendors. Euliss, the new company, sent out a crew to deliver a horizontal tank to replace the old one, leaving a mound of clay clods and three concrete blocks where the upright tank used to sit.

You haul off the blocks and rake the barren dirt smooth, then stand back, pleased with yourself for having “fixed” the problem, and continue walking past the grey scar for another month or so.

Then one morning in that stolen hour between coffee and the meaty part of your day, you wander outside to pull a few cool breaths and see those leveled dirt clogs in a different light. You get out the wheelbarrow, roll back the tarp over the compost pile, and get to work.

Be kind to these tender seedlings, you tell yourself sprinkling water in a soft, fine spray—protect them, believe in them, and they will thrive.

It wasn’t laziness that kept you from fixing this eyesore, it was lack of imagination. You don’t have to accept anything that does not serve you. Barren ground can always be amended and a new story, if tended, will take root.

I’d rather not start work so early, but shout I must because . . . well I don’t know why.

After I’m done making myself heard I’m ravenous, and unless one of those large, featherless birds have forgotten to stash their seeds, leaving a pile out in the open for all to steal, I must hunt, pecking through dry leaves and old flower heads for anything with protein and fat.

It takes a lot of energy to defend my newly-acquired domain from other red-crested males. I fly at them in fury. Some of them don’t even try to get away, and they are so hard that it hurts my beak when I smash into them. There’s a rumor about us being fooled by our own reflection, that what clearly is another cardinal is not even a real bird, but I don’t believe in conspiracy theories.

When I have time to contemplate the mysteries of life, I wonder about the featherless birds. Why do they sit in their wood and glass cages most of the time? Why do they cage themselves at all? Not for me to know, though, and I am very happy about their unattended food because it makes my job so much easier, giving me more time to sing the most beautiful song of everyone, a song that will surely bring me the most deserving lady cardinal so we can make a family.

Yes, it takes plenty of calories to accomplish everything that must be done. And there’s no sitting still for any of us non-predators. No, we must twitch and fiddle, constantly swiveling our heads so that eagles and hawks think we are on to them. No napping, no sir. You nap; you die. Or another bad bird moves in on your territory.

I’m not gonna lie, although I quite like the notion of coupling with a supple babe—I can practically smell her warm feathers—I don’t look forward to the work that lies ahead.

Nest building, for one, is a huge undertaking. Then, after she of the yeasty smell produces eggs, I’ll be foraging for two until they hatch. Fetching food and bringing it back to my mauve beauty.

And, after those little darlings hatch, she and I will be foraging for them, too. And not just seeds. We have to go all carnivore, finding insects and grubs to help them grow their tiny selves. Carrying off their poop sacks. Trying not to get eaten or let anything eat them.

It’s all too much, come to think of it. Whoever said “Free as a Bird” was obviously not avian. It’s all exhausting! Oh how I wish I could sleep in for once!

My dream of beating the system vanishes when I notice a lumbering yellow bus ahead, turning down the same back road I’ll be taking. Sure enough, it slows further within half a mile or so and the driver flings out the red stop sign. I pull up a respectful six or seven car lengths behind, mind racing. I’m wondering if I can reach home before the ice cream begins to melt, trying to remember what I’ve planned for dinner and how much prep is left, and hoping I’ll have time to process the two-pound ginger root I bought for eight dollars.

Stop, I tell myself, and looking out the windshield, I notice two people standing on the side road, one on a bicycle and the other holding back a floppy-eared dog. I can’t see the bus’s exit door, but the dog can and when it springs forward—tongue out as if to taste them—I know the door’s been opened. A moment later, the kids dart towards the group, backpacks flapping, and I feel a softening inside me, a big Awwwww escaping from my lungs.

A little further on the bus slows again. This time, I am fully alert, a slavering voyeur parked in the middle of a seldom-used road, no one behind me, window partially open to let in the warm air, no longer worrying about ice cream, dinner, or ginger.

The adults have arrived in a four-wheeler or a farm cart perhaps, and the children hurtle towards them like goslings or soft-shelled turtles in their oversized backpacks. Grateful for the few moments it takes for the bus to compose itself, I am mesmerized by the scene before me, the group focused on something inside the cart. I’m tempted to pull over and see for myself, imagining a puppy, or a tin of warm cookies.

The air pushes against my face, transporting me to my school years, when I knew nothing of war and depravity, and before I began making burdensome lists to keep me engaged with the mundane. I notice my longer-than-usual exhales, how they are inadvertently massaging my vagus nerve, and engaging my parasympathetic system. I don’t need a therapist, I just need to get behind a school bus every now and then.

We are moving again, the bus and I, and I grow excited when it slows for a third time. Two kids in homemade haircuts leap toward an aproned woman straddling a John Deer riding mower. I wonder what they’ll be having for dinner, picturing them eating together at one table like families did when I was a child.

A grey-haired couple sits on their front porch across the street, bathing in the same slice of ‘50s Americana, no doubt taking refuge in their imaginations, like me. Children, family, subsidized transportation, a rural road, spring air, dogs, bicycles, lawn mowers and aprons. A simple world. One to breathe easy in.

I’m disappointed when the driver turns off the main road, leaving empty asphalt ahead. I lick my lips, savoring the taste of my brief visit back in time, and reemerge into this day’s decade.

Oh Lord, deliver me from my latest piece of writing for I tire of pushing words around. Deliver me from the pain in my leg that keeps me from waking rested. May you take away the persistent itch in the middle of my back and, if it is a larval parasite from Belize, may you cause it to erupt from my skin and fledge.

Would that you could also heal my friends and neighbors from their small maladies and depressions, that you could (if you would, Lord) grant hope to the hopeless and restore short-term memory to the forgetful.

Oh powerful, all-knowing fixer, will you please rein in your human experiment, or at least cause their weapons to disintegrate and their vitriolic words to dissolve behind their lips unsaid. Please find a way to disable social media algorithms so that the other half will begin wearing masks. And while you’re in there, Lord, can you muck up online shopping for a week or two to give the planet a rest?

Please do what you can, Lord, to put the brakes on Big Ag, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Oil even if you must do it in the guise of a massive solar flare or meteorite. I can’t take much more war and planetary disruption Lord, and if you don’t mind my saying, your beloved humans have gone too far.

May you deliver us from the sixth extinction and restore Earth’s right to biodiversity. May you cause the bulldozers harm so that small pockets of animals might breathe and expand, so that the rains may resume in the deserts, the polar ice refreeze, and the flooding recede unless this is only the beginning of another great flood, in which case please carry on because, of course, you have always had this.

And Lord, if it’s not too much to ask, please remove the last eight months of growth from my hair as it has grown so long that it is getting trapped in my armpit when I try to sleep.

Amen

When I first started thinking about the year ahead, I drafted the following list of lost things, some of which have since been recovered.

My youthful innocence
My taste for candy corn
The four-dollar coat I cannot live without
Bladder control
My waistline
Patience for selfishness in others
That safe feeling I used to have alone in the car with my father
My Spyderco pocket knife, the one I could open with one hand
Humility in the face of beings bigger than me
The belief that my parents knew more than I about life
My balance
The ability to tolerate bores
Being able to jump four feet high
Baby fat
My Nana
Jesse the Wonder Horse

Things I might consider losing:
Distrust
The need to be in control
Regret
Disdain for those who don’t think like me

Things I’d like to find:
Twenty million dollars
Uncried tears
The story within the stories

I’m looking forward to mining old journals for nuggets of gold, excited about fixing the last 393 broken links in our Troutsfarmtoo website, and a little nervous about searching my psyche for narratives that no longer serve me.

By mucking around in the many facets of my life, I’ll likely stumble across things I’d forgotten or lost. Some of which I’ll be happy to recover, and others, which needed thrown out years ago.

They say it’s not an adventure if it doesn’t feel scary. Wish me luck!

11/2 Sun
She recognized me from a composting workshop I’d given with my husband, so we walked beneath the shedding overstory together, falling into a relaxed conversation about trees, retirement, and figuring out how to stay young.

11/3 Mon
I tugged one side while shoving the other, and the cart whirled a 180 like a Formula 1, earning startled glances from men who had been certain of their superior driving skills until they saw me handle a grocery cart.

11/4 Tue
The purple stems snapped and gave way as I tore the tradescantia out of the azaleas and peeled it away from the yarrow.

11/5 Wed
I opened the bedroom blinds, then crawled back under the covers, so Bob and I could watch the moon climb behind the Leyland cypress.

11/7 Fri
She chuckled, eyes bright, and gave me one of her signature side hugs.

11/8 Sat
We lay still, eyes pressed tight, trying not to jump with each flash and snap as thunder rained down upon our metal roof.

11/9 Sun
The thought of bed lay like frosting atop everything else I had yet to do today, daring me to eat it first, cake be damned.

11/11 Tue
The pain struck, so sharp and fleeting that I mistook it for a figment of my imagination.

11/12 Wed
After a night on the counter, my new sourdough starter stared back at me with dozens of eye bubbles, glossy and very much alive.

11/13 Thu
The sky quickened into a purple bruise in the time it took to log into My Social Security and read part of an essay on Substack.

11/14 Fri
It had grown warm in the house, but I hesitated to open the bedroom window for fear of spooking the sable-coated cat sitting regally upon the pine needle carpet beyond.

11/15 Sat
Bob and I sat on the back porch with our day-reading, enveloped in the pristine air, oblivious to the chittering chickadee.

11/16 Sun
I walked out across the grasslands, the undulating trill of insects in the tall blonde grass obscuring the sound of my footsteps.

11/17 Mon
I strained against the increased weight, laughing at the futility of it, and, relaxing my legs, dialed it down ten pounds.

11/18 Tue
Reading aloud to myself in the corner of my bedroom beneath a cone of LED glow, I grew annoyed with the insistent alarm—I’m trying to read this poem! I thought—then, realizing it was a chickadee, shifted my attention to the miracle of a new dawn, stood up, and opened the window blinds.

11/19 Wed
A flurry of bluebirds erupted from the birdbath when I stepped outside, and, as always, I reminded myself to look out the window first next time.

11/21 Fri
Bright orange persimmons mock me from their leafless perches, daring me to walk over and discover that they are still as hard as jumbo jawbreakers.

11/22 Sat
After a good rain, with temperatures in the 60s, I loaded a pickaxe into my wheelbarrow and went into the woods to pry coils of rusted fence from the softened ground, a task I had been putting off for months.

11/23 Sun
I nearly bit my lip in concentration, trying to pull together an overarching theme for self-improvement in 2026.

11/24 Mon
The fitness nurse blows a kiss, saying, “I love you guys!” long-striding past the chatty grey-hairs on the elliptical trainers.

11/25 Tue
Although my hands were steady, my burgeoning, pulse-throbbing unease confirmed I’d had too much caffeine, and there was nothing to do but ride it out.

11/26 Wed
Being careful not to get caught in the rusted wire spikes, I folded and stomped the old fence into a tidy bundle and loaded it onto the blue tarp in the back of my Tesla.

11/27 Thu
I turned to face the trees where I’d heard the yak-yak-yak-yak of the pileated woodpecker and stood frozen like a pointer dog until I was rewarded by a glimpse of its loopy flight.

11/28 Fri
Yesterday’s vibrant pepper leaves hung limply from their stalks after our first overnight freeze.

11/29 Sat
Feeling both selfless and superior, I poured hot water from our big pot into the frozen birdbath, then watched from the kitchen window for the first bird to curl its toes around the concrete lip and lower its tiny beak.

11/30 Sun
I squinted my eyes, I held my breath, but nothing was going to make the sun appear.

Defeated, I hand her the brush, and she shows me on her own long hair. “Start from the bottom and work your way up,” she says, pleased that I, her headstrong daughter who believes she knows more about everything than anyone, am open to a nugget of wisdom.

As a firstborn, I wanted to nail every task on my first try, but Mom’s skin-the-cat trope lodged itself in my brain, allowing for do-overs. I doubt I ever thanked her for that and other gems she stitched into my personality.

When I wonder how I came to be so outgoing, again, I have my mother to thank. I was ten when we moved to a neighborhood ripe with large families. Norwood Park was once “An Exclusive Summer Cottage Colony” built in the latter part of the 1880’s for the rich and famous in Long Branch, New Jersey, then America’s most popular resort destination. But by 1964, the cottages could be bought on a professor’s salary, and my father secured our 6-bedroom, 4100 square foot home for $18,000.

In an attempt to get some of her five children out from underfoot, Mom told me to take a couple of my brothers and go make some friends. I dutifully rounded up two of the boys, straightened my shoulders, and headed east along a thick privet hedge and up a short sidewalk to the first house, a modest ranch, out of place among the giant, old cottages.

I knocked at the door, smacking one of my brothers for picking at a scab on his arm, and when it opened, I said, “Hi. We’re moving in down the street. Do you have any kids our age we can play with?” The teenage girl looked surprised, then turned, and sent out a girl my age and her younger brother.

Whew, that was easy, I thought as we scampered off to climb up trees or onto shed roofs. We quickly became good friends and, through them, met dozens of other kids along our street.

So I guess my mom taught me how to bluff. To take charge and ask for what I wanted. To fake it ‘til you make it.

Years later, I got a job grooming yearling horses at a Standardbred breeding farm. My team’s first big challenge was bathing youngsters who had never been sudsed up. We hosed them down, rubbed shampoo into their coats, and submerged their tails in a bucket of soapy water. When it came time to comb out the knotted tail, I knew exactly what to do, thanks to my mom. Start at the bottom. Work your way up.

Several years before she died, the “skin the cat” phrase slipped from my mother’s lips, and then, giggling, she said, “Oh dear, what a terrible image I gave you poor kids. I might have scarred you for life!” We both laughed, and I told her that I’d truly never thought anything of it.

What I wished I had said is, “It’s because of you that I learned the wisdom of plan B’s and workarounds. Thank you, Mom!”