September Story

Well, the promise is that we will be getting cool weather this week. I'm more than glad to hear that, but I really need my furnace repairman to keep his promise and get back to me. Yes, I have called him, but that April promise that we would get my furnace back online and working is now coming to a point where said promise needs to be fulfilled. I really like the guy, and I'm pretty sure he'll get it done. I do have a little ace up my sleeve because I have a gas fireplace in my living room that I'm itching to turn on.



 My magical helpers have been earning their wings lately in my house. We have done our share of decluttering, decorating, cleaning, and enhancing. I'm sitting here right now with a brand new pedicure, and that is a luxury I've never had. I still have those same little crooked toes, but they sure look better. I call these two pedicured friends little hobbit feet. Sounds super enticing, does it not?



 I had a bit of an electrical issue last week, and my lights began to flicker, fade, flash, brown out, and expire. Then they would come right back on and repeat. Anything electrically powered caused this to happen, and sometimes the house just went through the paces by itself. After the power company checked my lines out, I called my wonderful electrician. He is a former student, and he is so good to me. Of course, he came right away and inspected the house and the antique ... I mean old... wiring that I have here. His verdict: I needed a major fuse, which he installed, and voila! the lights were back to normal.



 This young man is just wonderful…and very organized and sensible. He flat-out told me that my fuses should have just gone out. He said that they don't usually flare, flicker, flash, go out, and then come back on. I looked at him straight in the eyes and told him that the lights probably had gone out. Then I said that it was my magic that was causing all the flickering and flashing. My former student who knows me so well stood there a minute and thought of what to say. I can only imagine what might have been going through his mind, and some of it is kind of frantic because here sat his old school teacher mumbling about magic right in the middle of Missouri. But finally he looked at me and smiled. Then he said, "Yep. That sounds about like you."



 September is a month that bridges the gap from practical to magic. I don't know if any of you were lucky enough to get to see the new movie Practical Magic. It sure has big, pointy black shoes to fill. I got to thinking about my childhood and the magic that surrounded me as a little girl. I'm not sure, but I believe a good deal of it came from a Better Homes and Gardens collection of stories for young people. Another bit of it may have come from another storybook. In fact, according to the Internet, I have woven several short stories together. One of my favorite stories was “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” a Norwegian fairytale collected by Peter Kristen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe.  (I seem to remember the name of the story as “More North than North. More South than South.”)The story had a white bear who was a prince by night and a polar bear in the day. A young woman married him, and she was not allowed to look at him at night. When she disobeyed this promise, three drops of tallow from her candle fell on his shirt. It's an enchanting story of travel and love and magic. I thought there was an old witch called Baba Yaga in this story, but she doesn't appear in the current tellings of the tale.



However, I spent my younger days living out this story. I loved to take my collie dog and make the appropriate “sacrifices” to an old, invisible witch I called Baba Yaga as we went down to the creek near my house. It was the only Woodland area my parents allowed me to visit because I was a little bit too curious to go into the real woods that our farm holds. This is just a little creek that I can see every day from my windows. However, it was enough. Baba Yaga, that old witch, allowed me to sit by the side of that creek and absorb new stories that were not in the book. She told me tales and as long as I was good and my dog was good, we could sit and listen.



 My favorite time of the year to go was Autumn, of course. Was I afraid of snakes? Never! Nothing bothered me — including the bugs, the chiggers, or the threat of poison ivy and oak. My dog was very good, and so was I. We learned a lot. Old Baba Yaga shared her secrets well, but she made me promise not to tell you a single one. So, of course, I won’t.



As the first day of Autumn approaches on Tuesday, I plan to have a real pumpkin on my fireplace hearth, a candle glowing, and some vegetable soup. Beyond that, I suppose Autumn will have to enter on her own, and I look forward to those first frosty mornings. Do you have Fall traditions in your home? What is your favorite season? I'm lucky because my family represents all seasons. My mom's mother loved Spring, so pinks and greens and early flowers made her happy. My dad's mother was a fellow Autumn lover, so just the hint of Fall makes me want to bring out her special apple cake recipe and give it a whirl. My mother and my dad loved Summer. Nothing made them happier than haying time and garden time. Of course, that leaves old Mr. Winter, sitting in the corner by himself. I always hesitate to say it because people somehow blame me when the weather gets cold, but I love Winter. I love the short days, long whispery nights, the blustery wind, and of course, that magical and glorious SNOW. Let me know what season you embrace. Whatever it is, I hope the first day of Autumn brings you joy …and love …. and kindness.

I’m Batman

Tomorrow—or today, depending on when I decide to post this—would be Gerred’s 45th birthday.

I have been thinking about Batman and so much more.

Gerred was a Batman boy from the time he was little. He had a white cabinet in his bedroom that I suppose was intended to be a china cabinet, but there wasn’t a china cup in sight. It was stuffed with Batman toys and figurines, books, clippings, and whatever other Batman treasures he accumulated.

We had seen Michael Keaton as Batman at the movies, and as far as I was concerned, Michael Keaton was the real Batman. There have been other good ones. Gerred especially liked Ben Affleck, which surprised both of us a little, and we agreed Christian Bale was good. But Michael Keaton was Batman in the same way that there is only one real Santa Claus. The others may wear the suit, but you know.

Gerred wore black a lot, and for a big boy he was remarkably graceful. A gym teacher, Kyle Dill, once called him “Cat” because of the way he moved. That made one of his favorite little performances particularly appropriate.

It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing. It didn’t matter whether I was busy, aggravated with him, or trying to be serious about something. Gerred would sashay across the room, come right up beside me, raise one arm dramatically over his head, look me rivet eye to rivet eye, and announce:

“I’m Batman.”

And my heart would laugh.

He knew it, too.

There was another Batman day when Gerred was probably eleven or twelve. We were driving through Huntsville on what must have been one of those wonderful big-trash days when people put things out by the road that are much too interesting to drive past without looking.

And there it was.

It was an enormous cardboard Batman display, probably from a store or movie theater. It must have been five or six feet tall and ten or twelve feet long, folded in the middle—a whole Batman scene sitting out by somebody’s trash.

I hit the brakes.

“Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

I backed up right there on the highway, looked at him, and said, “Of course we’re getting it.”

Because of course we were.

My heart was thumping, and I know his was about to beat out of his chest. We wrestled and wiggled and waddled that enormous thing around until somehow we got it into my car and brought it home. Then we had to clear a corner of Gerred’s bedroom, which was no small undertaking. His bedroom was not Zen. Eventually we slithered our prize into place and pronounced it good. It was beautiful.

Gerred and I always considered that one of our great trash-day scores. His daddy had been a great repurposer, always able to see what some discarded thing might become and dreaming up another life for it. I think there was a little bit of his daddy in our excitement that day, too. Somebody else had thrown something away, and we could see treasure.

And then there was the Batman suit.

By this time Gerred was too tall and too grown-up-shaped for the children’s Batman costumes hanging at Walmart, but he still wanted to be Batman. He loved, absolutely loved to dress up in a costume.

Unfortunately, he had a mother who couldn’t sew. That isn’t entirely true. My Grandma Minnie was a wonderful seamstress. She made both of my wedding dresses, and when I was a girl in 4-H, I could sew quite nicely—as long as I was safely tucked under Grandma Minnie’s wing, with considerable supervision and occasional intervention.
Outside Grandma Minnie’s wing, my sewing ability deteriorated considerably.

But Gerred wanted a Batman suit.

So we repurposed a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants. He had black gloves and black tennis shoes. Most of Batman was therefore taken care of.

All Mama had to do was make the headgear. This turned out not to be a particularly beginner-friendly sewing project. It had to fit over his head and come down around his neck, and most importantly, it had to have those unmistakable Batman ears.

I made it.

He put the whole thing on and went wherever he was going—I can’t remember now whether he wore it for Halloween, Homecoming parade, or both. I do remember that he was terribly hot. Gerred ran hot anyway, and when he finally pulled that black headpiece off, his hair was absolutely wet and sweat was running down his face.
But he was grinning.

“I felt like Batman,” he said.

And then again:
“ I felt like Batman.”

That was all I needed to hear. My sewing had been a success. Then he looked at me, with that little Gerred grin, and added: “Thank you, Mama. It kind of looks like a cat, but thank you.”

Apparently I had made the ears a little too big.
He had wisely waited until after the event to mention it.

Years later, Gerred became a much better seamster than his mother and even made himself a Japanese hakama. Maybe that Batman costume helped convince him that somebody in the family needed to learn how to sew properly.

I don’t have many pictures to go with these stories. I may have one of him dressed more like a ninja , but this isn’t really about Batman. It’s about a little boy and then a young man who could make his mother laugh by walking across a room in black, striking a ridiculous pose, looking her straight in the eye and saying two words.

It’s about the day we found treasure in somebody else’s trash.

It’s about a homemade costume with ears that looked suspiciously feline, worn by a boy who didn’t care because, for that little while, he felt like Batman.

Gerred would be 45 years old on September 5.  I suspect he would still have had opinions about who wore the suit best. And I know that if the moment were just right, he might still have walked over, raised that arm above his head, looked me rivet eye to rivet eye and said:

“I’m Batman.”
And I think my heart would have laughed exactly the same way.❤️

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