RETIREMENT COUNTDOWN!

The Countdown is on. I have 21 more days of commuting to the city.

Some things I’ve already done:

• Sold house
• Moved out
• Put money in bank
• Gone to eye doctor, regular doctor and dentist
• Looked into insurance post-retirement
• Scanned p t jobs, way too early
• Talked about retirement to everyone I meet to get tips

Now it’s time to do a daily blog about it. So here goes:

Today is Sat 11/11 and I am retiring on Wed, 12/12. 

It’s a lovely sunny 20* day in VT and I am plunked down on my sofa with a pillow in my lap acting as a desktop. I began watching Julie and Julia—the movie about a gal//writer named Julie and her blog about Julia Child. She spent a year cooking one or more recipes from Julia’s cookbook—The Art of French Cooking. Mostly out of boredom and because she felt if she didn’t she would go crazy.

Unfortunately I cannot blog and watch a movie about a blog at the same time. Or can I? I forgot
about my PHONE! Maybe I’ll call mine Evie is Leavie or something. (Okay , maybe not)


Okay  daily blog isn’t gonna happen seeing’s how this is the 16th, as my southern Kentucky land lady  says.

I Used to Be....Now I'm....

I used to be....now I'm...

I used to be afraid of having fun. Now I'm not (as much.)

There were four of us riding down the smooth, newly honned dirt road, one behind the other in a dark blue baby buggy with white stitching and white wall tires. All chrome. Very sweet. Riding down the road. Squealing with delight. "Faster! Faster!" we hollered to our 9 year old sister, our pilot. Ticona held fast onto to the shiny chrome handles. We perched inside, arms spilling out as we flew. Mariah was three and in front, I was four and a half, Jerri was almost six. Acey was eight.

Sunny afternoon, mid July. Blue sky. Puffy white clouds. Perfect.

Until we hit the rock, the soft sand on the side, veered off into the double barbed wire fence. Electric. And it was on. Mariah flew out and into the field, Acey over our heads after her. Jerri and I were trapped under the pram.

I must have grabbed the fence because I have always had scars  on my hands. I definitely struggled. I remember shouting NO! shaking my head back and forth, ripping open my face.

Ticona tried to make it right. The worst part was that because the buggy was mostly chrome, it was electrified. Every time Ticona touched it, she got another jolt.  OW OW!

GET IT OFF HER! GET IF OFF THE FENCE! someone cried.

Finally I must have crawled out of it or Acey may have snagged it off....I don't know because all I could see was red. Blood in my eyes, coming from the top of my head, my forehead, cheek. My face had essentially been ripped off.

Screaming and screaming and crying and terrified, Jerri grabbed my hand and ran me down the road to the house. Our feet barely hitting the ground. In blood and shock.

For some reason I remember that I was wearing a little girl white T shirt and blue shorts. By the time we got to the house, only 30 yards away, my T shirt was drenched in little girl blood. I remember blinking and seeing the blood running down my left arm and off my fingers.

We got to the farmhouse and to Mother and Dad. Later Daddy said he knew something was really wrong when he heard "you girls screaming like that." Mother washed me up and wrapped me in a white bed sheet fresh from the line, taped my face back on, rocked me back and forth. Stayed up all night to make sure my wounds didn't re-open. Let me sleep in my parents bed for nights thereafter. She never looked at me the same after that. Nobody did. When you're a little girl, about to start first grade and you have a scar across your face as big and red as that one was? Nobody looks at you the same as they look at other pretty little girls in your family.

I am fortunate, really, because a few inches lower and that fence would have gotten me in the neck---the corotid. Jugular. Blood would have squirted out with every beat of my little girl heart. A heart that earlier pounded with glee, replaced by adrenalin, kicked into survival mode....a heart that knew where home was. Even when she couldn't see.

It took years to get over the feeling that if I let myself go, really let go the way most people do on ferris wheels, even tree swings, on bicycles...something tragic would happen. Something horrible and bloody would come and spoil everything. Scar me for life. I used to be afriad to have fun. Now? Not as much...

Nothing But Lies

"How's your new engagement ring?" my niece Eliza asked me as she hopped into the passenger's seat of my car. She chuckled as I backed the car around and headed out of the driveway.

"Oh my God!" she laughed. "You won't believe what your sisters are saying!"  She was wrong there. I knew them and had for over 50 years. She had only had to put up with their shenanigans for like 30.

"What now?" I asked.

"Well, Jema (her mother) has been saying you're engaged to somebody but none of them can figure out who!"

"Oh, it must have been my joke on Facebook. I put a photo of this ring (I showed her the tastefully done cz ring I'd purchased at a local box store for 8$ on sale.) I had posted, "Sometimes a ring is just a ring."

"Hey, that's nice!" she said. "Looks real, too. That must have stirred the girls up. Hee hee hee."

"Must be they have someone stalking my pages again. Nothing else to do, I guess."

"Yup. They need to get a life!" she said, sucking down the contents of her plastic cup with ice cubes.

We laughed. She had been my friend ever since she was little and just walking around. She got me.

She filled me in on what her mother and my other sisters had been saying. That if I was being secretive, I must be hiding something...

"They have two theories. Get this: either you're seeing a married man or a woman."

"Wrong on both counts," I said. 

"Well that's what they're trying to prove...You're not gonna like this but at first they thought it was Mr. Bartlow, your old English teacher from high school."

"What?" I asked.

"Yeah, they say that's why you're trying to buy that condo! Apparently he lives in that area!"

"Well, this means war!" I said through my teeth. (As a certified English teacher, I was never so insulted!)

It was true that I  had posted a bunch of lovey dovey crap about true love and whatnot on FB. You know, quotes from George Bernard Shaw and Will Shakespeare. Then I downloaded and pinned a ton of bride and groom pics. I even posted a photo of a wall plaque I had taken at an Air B N B in Toronto--- Happily Ever After.

So I wasn't at all surprised when I'd gotten the call from my youngest sister, the leader of the Sister Gang.

"Hey! Heard you're getting hitched, Evie."

"What? Who told you that?"

"I have my ways," was her sly retort. "I know everything that goes on in this family."

"I don't know what you're talking about, " I said. And for emphasis, "I gotta go!" And hung up.

So I had laid down that foundation. No wonder they had it down to those two possibilities.

"We need to think up a lie, Eliza said. "We need to spread a rumor about you. Throw them off the scent."

"Yeah," I said. "Smoke them out of their fox hole!" (We high 5ed on that one.)

We decided that the best candidate was a "mildly famous celebrity" who was a) single b) a man and c) around my age.

"I've got it! Rusty Deweese!" she finally said, almost choking herself to death with her drink.

"The logger?" I asked  her. (For those of you who don't know, he is a stand up Vermont story teller from the Stowe area. Red headed and very pale skinned. Does a Vermont dialect that I don't recognize but I was only raised here and lived here all my life.) 

"Perfect," I said. "It's settled."  ANOTHER HIGH FIVE.

Eliza was to go see her mother the next day and tell her that she had tried to get Antie Eve to admit to who she was seeing, but she got nothing. She was to say she had seen me outside Black Cap Coffee in Stowe holding hands with some dude, who looked like the Logger but couldn't have been.

That I had gotten in my car and given him a smootch. She could have been wrong, but she THOUGHT it was him.  She was to tell her mother, "DO NOT TELL YOUR SISTERS," which would ensure her telling them the truth of the lies and adding on a few more juicy details.

Just for good measure I "friended" the Logger on Facebook, downloaded two of his photos and "liked" a bunch of his posts. Replied to some. I even shared an upcoming charity event he had planned in Enosburg Falls High School which was, coincidentally, where I used to teach.

In the end I was busy the night of the event and one of my older sisters, Ty, did go and said THE GIRLS didn't show. Eventually my sister Marina phoned from North Carolina saying the girls were all wound up about who I was going to marry! That they wouldn't stop obsessing about it.

So I had to tell her the truth---that the whole thing was nothing but lies.

"Good for you!" she said. "They deserve what they got. They need to learn to mind their own business."

They've left me alone ever since. :)