Turtle Goes Fishing

The day was calm and fishful
at least the fisherman was wishful.
When he took his light canoe
And sought a quiet spot

 Near the shore the rocks were slippery
His vessel prone to flippery
So he braved the deeper waters
Where fish just might be caught












But ski boats agitated
Sent waves that aggravated
The canoe was buffeted a bit
And the fish were scared away










So he rowed back empty-handed,
Made sure the boat was landed,
And he had an impressive sunburn
To show for the entire day.

Banh Gai

Every now and then, Claye manages to talk her father into taking her to the Asian Market in the city. Since he has to make frequent trips to the city to visit parishioners in the hospital, and since he likes the company on such trips, he is more than willing to oblige her. Yesterday they brought back some delicious, plain white rolls and several suspicious-looking packages of strange stuff that looks more like something you plant with each seed of corn than something you would eat.
Tonight, for dessert, they decided to try Banh Gai, a lotus Leaf Cake.

Claye gave Turtle the privilege of tasting it first, since he's the man of the house and in charge of braving danger for his family.

He began to unwrap it carefully, holding his knife ready just in case it was still alive. Right away, we could all see that wasn't the case. The blue-green, almost black seepage was a give-away.

After peeling away multitudinous layers of husks, Turtle discovered a gelatinous mass of gooey stuff, the center of which was white.

He tasted it, being particularly careful not to stain his beard.

He gave it a few seconds,
trying to decide whether he liked it or not.

And he bravely pronounced it:
"not so bad...but not so good" either.

Now he wants me to try it, and says I'm a coward, unwilling to try new things. I just laugh. Nobody will give me a guilt complex that way. . . and as long as I have a choice about it, lotus cake won't be on my diet.

From Whence These Right-brained Souls?

Help! I'm now living in a house with two artists!
First Claye slowly turned into a sculptor; now Turtle has suddenly blossomed into a sketcher.
We should call him Grandpa Moses, I think, because when he gets into a hobby, he seriously gets into it, though there be any number of Red Seas before him.  Turtle started taking lessons from Claye, who agreed to give him some pointers, although drawing isn't really her forte. Then he bought books on the subject and has now filled the den with every perfect shade and texture of pencil and every size of  drawing notebook

 Whenever he has to sit and wait--and that's not uncommon for a pastor who makes hospital calls--he draws portraits of the people sitting around him, and while he is sitting at conventions or in airports, he sketches the nearby buildings.

The good thing about it is that he is helping to illustrate my lesson plans for the Wednesday night children's program; The bad thing is...well...I kind of wish I could paint or something or maybe play the piano or the cello or write legibly...yes that would be a good start. I'll work on that.

Anyway, to give you some idea of what this is all like: I came home from work a couple of days ago and found this shopping list on my fridge:

Sunset Hike

Turtle and I went hiking last night out north of town. By the looks of that piled up cloud ahead, we were risking a storm, but that didn't deter us at all.

In fact, if our getting soaked on a hike means rain has come at last, we are up to the sacrifice.



Anyway, true to form for any trip with Turtle, we left a little later than we wanted to, so our planned four-mile endeavor turned into a hurried three-mile jaunt, with the last mile rather nervously trudged along an old railroad track... within the range of coyote yips.

For the first mile, we walked between two pastures: one full of bored black cattle and the other full of the setting sun. I kept stopping to take pictures and getting hit by turtle, who was carrying a twenty-five pound pack.

He's getting ready for a real hike with some friends--a backpacking excursion in the mighty Ozarks, back where there are real streams and roads that go up and down and around bends. So far there are four or five men going, and most of them are in great physical shape.

I'm a little worried about Turtle keeping up with them. However, he assures me that he won't have any trouble. His twenty-five pound pack will be lighter than what he has been carrying on his body for the last five years.

Turtle's lost thirty pounds since January. However, he hasn't been exercising at all, so his muscles and bones were complaining a little yesterday evening. As for the hike? Well, he'll plod along behind, I'm sure, but then he's always been a plodder. We didn't just randomly pick Turtle for his nickname.

This evening we'll try it again, hiking out into the country. Maybe there'll be another beautiful sunset or promising storm. I'll carry a little backpack myself, maybe fifteen pounds or so. There's no use in over doing it.

 So, what will I carry in it? I think some bear mace, a squirt bottle full of ammonia for coyotes, a snakebite kit, and a sturdy stick to knock the rattlers off the railroad tracks. 

I'm a real wilderness gal.

Red Bud Trees

"There sure are a lot of those blue trees beside the road," remarked my husband, as we drove out in the spring countryside.



"Blue? Where?"

"There's one now. Right there."

"Those are not blue. They're purplish-pink."

"That's what Claye said. Still, they look blue to me."


Turtle has a "red" deficiency color-blindness, so I guess if you take the red from purple that leaves blue.


They're called red bud trees. I wonder why. Shouldn't they be pinkish, purplish bud trees?
Turtle would have called them "blue bud trees."

Nate, Descendant of Yorick

Since she works at a gallery and has some time on her hands, my daughter, Claye, has been toying with the idea of giving art lessons. No sooner did Turtle hear this than he decided to become her first pupil. Well, he is colorblind, so being reluctant to plunge into oil or acrylics, he began with sketching and drawing faces. For several weeks he's been working on technique, but Claye is not the most complimentary of daughters. She insists that he's looking at the picture and then drawing from preconceived ideas and not what he is actually seeing. So, in order to make him feel the underlying structure of the human face, she ordered a prop for him on eBay. It arrived in fine form, rattling about in the box with a page of paper attached to the jaw that had one word on it:  "Nate". 
I have to say that seeing his grin on the kitchen bar or in the drawing room takes a little getting used to.

Beowurtle

When it comes to Turtle and skills, I wonder if he hasn't descended from Norse stock, lived in Hrothgar's Hall and wrestled Grendel perhaps. Now before you raise that eyebrow and say "huh", bear with me a minute. I have my reasons for thinking this, the chief of which is his strange affinity for kenning-like hobbies skills. As long as we have been married, Turtle's brain has spun with orbiting interests as if affected by the laws of planetary motion; however, his passions come and go with widely varying schedules. Unlike the planets, they almost all begin with a B and are two-word expressions. My Norse-man is a: bee-keeper, bow-hunter, bike-peddler, back-packer, buck-skinner and book-binder.  I think the b must stand for "buy", because every time one of these interests strikes, he adds a few items to the equipment he needs for the hobby interest.

Lately, however, Turtle has added a seventh interest. Whether this means, having reached the perfect number, he will at last attain satisfaction in his own capacity for extraneous abilities, or whether this spells big trouble, I'm not sure. You see, this one has broken the streak of b's. It's fly-fishing.

Scary. ..has he migrated to another solar system and will he now begin to accumulate random skills like flee-bargaining and face-booking?

Skunk Saga Finale

Happy birthday to my fearless hero, who single-handedly, at the advice of poison control, crawled under our house last night, wearing coveralls, goggles, a spelunker's head lamp, and a painter's mask (where is your apocalyptic gas mask when you actually need it?) and collected the sixty five mothballs I had flung under there to expel a skunk, but the fumes of which were expelling us!

Turtle's Little Joke

I was writing for Sketches this morning, addressing the "prompt" for Three Word Wednesday. The words were: noble, hidden, and roam. Just as I was finishing a poem, Turtle came into the room and asked what I was doing. Of course he wanted to know what the words were. Immediately, he came up with this one:

"When you watch an Italian movie, you wonder just how deeply hidden, is the secret which made the nobility of Rome."

Spoonerism

Turtle just created a spoonerism that made us both laugh. He said:

Well, it's 200 miles away...as the fly crows.

I tried to locate a picture of a crowing fly, but this was the closest I could find.
He does look like he is trying to
say something, but not wake the world in the
early morning.

I think I know the subconscious reason for the slip though: Turtle has a new hobby; he ties flies. Flies, yes. Like fly-fishermen use at the ends of those long whips they call fishing lines.
Anyway, he wrestles with string, scissors, wires, fluff balls, and silk to create little poofs of fuzzy stuff that resemble an insect or a baby mouse and hide mean hooks. He has to use tying tools for making tiny knots and magnifying glasses to see them. He calls it relaxing. Go figure that one!

It Must Be Green Again

My husband Turtle is colorblind.
Not totally colorblind, mind you, so that his world is black, white and all gray in- between, but a faded sort of colorblind that can't tell the difference between red, orange, and yellow; that only sees the blue in aqua and purple (making them the same color); and that cannot tell the difference between green and brown.

Poor guy.

I feel sorry for anyone who can't see green. Especially at this time of year, when glorious green sings mightily under the pale blue sky.

I sigh contentedly out the car window,
"It's so beautiful out there."

He says: "What? Oh. It must be green again."

The Old Man Himself

Well I'm sure a lot of little kids would like to know what he looks like in January, after the beard's been trimmed and the hustle and bustle of life has calmed down.