Shouldn't…but Do

She’s brought news to my mailbox as long as I have lived here, and she’s quitting soon.

The newspaper lady – a woman capable of projecting a rolled newspaper into a mailbox newspaper slot while only barely slowing her vehicle. Ten years worth of daily news, and I can’t remember that she ever missed a day.

But impeccable aim and service are not her finest qualities. Every month without fail I received handwritten “thank you” notes for an added monthly $2 tip. She has the distinction of being the only person I ever knew to thank me for a “refreshing” tip, never failing to end her notes with the “God Bless” that is her steadfast trademark.

Even the notes don’t capture Naomi. The newspaper has cut her salary to 30% of what it was ten years ago, and carpel tunnel surgery is going to be her reward for all those magnificent hand-offs.

We have all known someone like her. Someone whose work ethic and faith fused a path she was happy to follow. And it is probably that simple happiness that is her finest quality, the greetings exchanged each winter afternoon as I trudged the neighborhood, the excitement as my garden came to bloom in the summer. She saw it, shared it all, every day, without fail.

Life is steady, purposeful, for people like Naomi. I will miss her.

Peanut gallery alert: Warning essay ahead…

I am a fan of St. Patrick’s Day.

On a day when “all the world is Irish,” it matters not, at least in my opinion, whether a blood claim exists. There is something for everyone – a spring festival, a saint, the gritty origins of the world’s biggest immigrant celebration.

In 1845 a highly infectious, fungus-like pathogen called Phytophthora infestans (commonly known as “Late Blight) changed the course of Irish history. In the mid-1800’s, Ireland was a generally poor country that supported a population of about eight million, one-third of which was either entirely or significantly dependent on the cultivation of potatoes as a staple food. By 1901, after the Famine era, the population had fallen to four million.

The crop failure that occurred during 1845 coincided with a period of Irish population growth as well as economic stagnation. The potato failure of 1845 should not have had a lasting effect on Ireland. However, the lack of effective intervention by Irish landlords, merchants and most importantly, the British government, transformed the crop failure of 1845 into a famine known as An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger).

Successive crop failures between 1845 and 1851 and an inability or unwillingness to provide assistance to the poor and destitute brought unimaginable pain, disease or death to over two million souls who fled into Ireland’s underworld arms or sailed beyond the ninth wave to find new life in countries such as America and Canada. Tragically, many of those seeking to escape the famine died on disease-ridden vessels known as “coffin ships.”

Ironically, the pathogen that caused the potato famine itself came from the Americas (central Mexico) and traveled across the Atlantic to Belgium where it began its deadly devastation of European potato fields in 1843. The ravages of poverty, pestilence and politics permanently changed the lives of those who call themselves Irish.

Millions of people fled Ireland’s broken hearth during and in the years following the Great Hunger. Carrying their culture and their connectedness with them, these immigrants took up residence all over the world. The fortune, political clout, and identity forged by these immigrant populations abroad has served to sustain their ties with Ireland.

Whether or not the descendents of these immigrant families ever physically return to Ireland is not of consequence. With no geographic borders, the Irish psyche remains connected over boundless space and time, and sometimes, I think, over history.

Beannachtai Na Feile Padraig – The Blessings of St. Patrick on you.

There’s a banana peel out on the North Forty, next to the street. It had been perched atop a snowbank for some time before I introduced myself.

I could have collected it for the trash can, and my property might have looked less like a compost pile – but consider – what is a banana peel doing on a snowbank? Drive-by toss? Garbage truck escapee? The incongruency of a tropical peel astride a snowbank piqued my interest, much as roadside attractions do.

Each day I walked by and nodded, a perfectly cordial peel.

As the snow melted, the peel lost altitude, and the day after it rained, with no snowbank to cushion it, it sprawled on the flattened, brown grass.

Two days ago, decidedly brown, yesterday, almost rancid, its cheerful yellow coat replaced by mush. The benefits of refrigeration.

Things last longer when chilled. Get a little warm? True colors show, decomposition holds sway, for the worse, and eventually for the better.

If the object of life is to cling to what looks good, chill may win out. But even now, in changed, blackened form, beginning mucousal slide toward the storm drain, that mush has a rich journey into disintegration, eventually becoming fertile organic detritus. That says a lot more than that perky peel ever did.

Think of a word……..yes, that one. Not the one that sounds better, the one you thought of very first. Now, if you feel like it, send it to me at:

dustycrossroads@gmail.com

or

leave it as a comment to this post. Whatever you would like. I’m just gathering words, not email addresses and the like. No privacy issues here, I won’t be keeping the email, just the word.

In this interactive world, it occurs to me that it would be interesting to learn that first word, the one ready to jump into being at that moment’s notice.

If you read this bog, it means that you either feel sorry for me and do your part to read the things that I shouldn’t write, but do, or that perhaps you have a quirky interest in life’s big and small things.

So, I thought it would be interesting to hear the word that was waiting there, on your mind, whenever you might read this particular bog – the day it was posted – or three years from now.

And if you don’t want to, not to worry, that is okay too.

I have had a cell phone for maybe ten years. Mostly for emergency purposes, out and about, always wanted to make sure my children could reach me.

I am not the kind that rushes to a ringing phone, caller ID was made for folks like me. So in all that time, I never enabled my cell phone voicemail. Energy deposited when you’re not looking, voices creating obligation. More obligation, more. Too much.

Yesterday I set up voicemail. I wondered why I hadn’t. The thought of someone calling back when I am on the move seems novel. Something I would like to try. Some seeming circuit becoming complete. Another mailbox gets a lift.

On a peerless blue day, the sound of a jet drew my attention skyward. As is so often the case, the plane was long past the sound in the sky that had caught my thought. The contrail wend its way westward.

The jet, progenitor of both plume and roar, was long beyond before I cast my eyes upward. Funny how things in the sky often have a cause and effect, lightning and thunder, jets and their traces.

But the similarity ends there, I think. Lightning splits the mind, the circumstance, and rattles our cages with its voice. Skyward airplanes deliver, slipping silently past before we see and hear winding footsteps.

Life comes both ways, highly charged or lost in thought, and clouds.