I am a hedonist and AND is my favorite word. But I don’t think there’s as much of a conflict between desire and contentment as we’ve been led to believe. Contentment is not the absence of desire.
I am, in many respects, very content. I love my home, my friends, my boyfriend, my dogs, my job, and my calling in life. I want all these things and I work hard to maintain these relationships and duties. There is a desire to maintain this contentment. It took me a lot of years to achieve this state of being.
What is it about birds and old people? I’ve noticed a phenomenon for years now – the older one gets the more interested in watching birds they get. By the time of white hair and chin whiskers, we are out there with our cameras and bird books looking for a red-breasted honeysuckle titmouse.
In many traditions, birds are seen as a messenger of heaven. Is that it? The closer we get to the afterlife, the more interested in its messengers we are?
My mom has always been entranced with birds. She inherited her grandmother’s bird figurine collection and we’ve added to it over the years. She has multiple curio cabinets – we call them birdcages – in which the birds are displayed.
The birds have been on view since the 1980s.
But even my mother’s interest has gone up in her waning days.
I bought her a bird feeder that could be stuck to the outside of the picture window via suction cups. It was small. Too small for the hordes of birds that showed up. That tiny feeder morphed into a small table with a large flat bowl filled with seeds.
We are entertained for hours watching the birds – woodpeckers, blue jays, cardinals, and something small we think is a titmouse, but we’re not sure. Hence the need for a bird book. I keep threatening to take my good camera and zoom lens down there to get proper photos. I too am getting white-haired and whiskered. Other than buying my mom a bird figurine now and again, I have been largely uninterested in birds.
I don’t understand this new interest of mine. And it’s just a burgeoning interest. I haven’t really acted on it yet. I haven’t bought the guidebook. Or dragged out the camera. My famous last words may be, “I’ll never join a birdwatching group.”
My mother will likely only be with us for a few more years. I am slated to inherit the bird collection. Nobody really wants it. It’s large and easily takes over the average-sized house. But those glass birds meant a great deal to my great-grandmother and to my mother. I can’t bear to see them end up in a flea market somewhere. I have decided to take all of the birds and one of the birdcages, i.e. curio cabinet.
The cabinet is very nice. Very old. Big. Claw feet. Primarily glass. I think it will live upstairs in my hallway. There’s one spot that may be perfect for it. I will choose among the birds a small selection to display. It will be my homage to the generations of Dalton women who loved birds.
My great-grandmother raised canaries. She had a pretty big enterprise going on. The bird room in her house was, I’m guessing, about 25 feet by 15 feet. My mother tells me it was lined floor to ceiling with cages filled with canaries. The room was flooded with sunlight on most days. When the birds would sing, the sound was ethereal.
Helping my great-grandmother with the canaries is a treasured memory of my mother’s. I gave her a canary for Christmas years ago – probably more than 40 years ago. We named him Kendrick – my grandmother’s maiden name. Only the males sing so we knew he was a he.
Kendrick provided much joy but died in fright while having his toenails clipped one brutally cold Saturday morning. My mother was distraught.
A few years later, I replaced Kendrick. He eventually died as well, and my mom said she didn’t want another. So, we’ve been sans live birds for many years now.
I wonder, now, if it might not be time for another Kendrick. I’m always at a loss for a Christmas gift for my mother, but these days I don’t even know where’d you go to get a canary.
Are there no longer women raising canaries in a bird room of their house?
I think it interesting that my Michigan lineage now lives in West Virginia – home to the canary in the coal mine. I’m sure those Michigan canaries my great-grandmother raised were not headed for the coalmines, but someone around here had to have been supplying the miners with them.
There must be an old Appalachian woman reminiscing about the bird room she used to have where the canaries sang in the sunlight.
My Michigan people out-migrated from Appalachia generations ago – my great-grandmother originally from Tennessee to Gape Girardeau, Missouri to Flushing, Michigan where my great-grandfather worked in an auto factory and commercially farmed.
For all I know, raising canaries was a time-honored hobby of Appalachian women – a means of earning a little extra money.
Yes, I will inherit the birds and I’ve already decided that I will keep all the figurines that depict canaries. I’m pretty sure they will easily fill that large curio cabinet. I’m a little more excited about inheriting them than I let on. The collection will be a burden. But it is also a blessing.
I both love and hate the ripped jeans fashion. I love it because in the olden days– Connie sits in her rocker, wraps herself in a shawl, and takes a sip of her tea before continuing– we owned one maybe two pairs of jeans that we wore incessantly. Without ceasing. I would sit in my bedroom in my underwear during the infrequent washings waiting for them to be dry.
We came by our holes and rips honestly. None of this pre-torn business. I could tell you, like scars on my body, the story of each denim degradation. They were badges of honor.
And when they became too ripped or too torn, we mended them with embroidery and/or patches. Mine were a kaleidoscope. Before tattoos, we adorned our jeans with images and words and symbols. Thus, there were no large rips, but as grunge took hold in the 90s, ripped jeans sans embroidery were sported. These too were come by honestly, I think. At least for the most part. I had an old pair of Levis that developed a hole. The hole lengthened and widened. During one washing, they split from mid-thigh to knee. I was still young enough that flashing that part of my leg was kind of sexy, the rip was positioned so as not to be obscene.
I wore those jeans around the house and to the beach. I actually thought of them as my beach jeans. I rather enjoyed sitting on the balcony at night, drinking wine, and watching the glimpse of skin through my ripped jeans get darker and darker. I didn’t wear them out anywhere, mind you. Well, maybe to the gas station or to pick up pizza, but they were comfort jeans. They finally just disintegrated – tore and split so much that they were no longer comfortable or interesting. I couldn’t bear to throw them away. They are upstairs somewhere. I have a lot of memories infused in those jeans. The ones from my youth, the embroidered ones, were thrown out by mom as she thought I had outgrown them. I had, but I was bereft all the same. They were a scrapbook of my life.
Now, my jeans except for one pair that are just starting to get suitably worn, are pristine and suitable for work and heels. Yoga pants, for the most part, have replaced my daily pair of jeans as my comfort vehicle. They just don’t have the same panache. And comfortable though they are, they are still not as comfortable as vintage shrink-to-fit, button-fly Levi’s. I still have those. They are indestructible but I am, at present, too large to wear them. I will get back in them. I will.
Those lovelies conform to your body and remember the curves and straightaways. A marvel of clothing construction. These were the original jean marketed during the gold rush. They are much too large when you buy them. Much too large. There’s a conversion chart to use. After purchase, you don them and sit in a bathtub of warm water. Launder and dry them. Rinse and repeat until the magic time when you took them out of the dryer and put them on to find it was like being naked with pockets. You had reached nirvana. With every washing, they’d tighten up a bit but relax to the proper size after a few minutes. Levi’s shrink-to-fit 501s were the pinnacle of jean technology.
Every now and again, I see them for sale. Always expensive, the price is now really silly, but these things were thick and indestructible. I don’t think I ever tore or developed a hole in the shrink-to-fits. I have some, pining for my 20-year-old body to return, that are more than 40 years old. They sit there in the jean bin, just waiting to be worn and loved again.
So, I very much hate these pre-ripped, pre-distressed jeans with both knees torn out symmetrically or worse the Venetian blind effect on the thighs. That’s just gauche.
But I adore my vintage jeans – the ones that earned those rips through hard wear and good times.
I am the Hillbilly Diva. I have been for years. My blog is subtitled A Hillbilly Diva’s Blatherings. I have been blathering on the internet since 1989. In the early days, I was very paranoid about people knowing who I was in real life. My blog was anonymous for years. I had an email address that was practically untraceable. This continued until after Barack Obama was elected. I came out on Facebook as my real name. I had been Connie Oberfuhrer.
This was my avatar for years. I don’t know where the image came from or who to credit it to.
With the election of Obama, I felt hope and peace and love. I no longer cared who knew who I was, and I no longer needed to be anonymous. Plus, Facebook was cracking down on fake accounts.
I’m starting to be paranoid again. These are ugly times we live in. Yes, I realize they’ve been ugly always, but now the underbelly is exposed, and the ferocious dog wags its tail. The ugliness expects to be not just agreed with but praised for his divisiveness. For its hate.
I have reached that part of a woman’s life when she becomes invisible. People, particularly men, don’t much notice me any longer. In Frankie and Grace, they did a bit about the invisibility of old age. I had been talking about it for some time.
In my youth, I was quite attractive. I didn’t know it, for the most part, though I had pretty decent self-esteem for a woman who came of age in the 70s. Who had been battered and bruised by the commercials to make us not smell like ourselves, to enhance what was right and hide what was wrong. To get rid of excess weight and acne and gray hair. To ward off wrinkles. I lived fast in those early years – on 3 hours of sleep at night – one social engagement after another, one party after another going to work bleary-eyed with stories to tell. My blood alcohol level probably still too high.
I am at peace with myself now. For the most part. I would like to lose some of this COVID weight. Not enough to do anything about it, mind you, but it bothers me some. Besides, my clothes don’t fit, and I am too poor to afford new.
I do wear makeup, fake nails, and gaudy jewelry. Recently, I’ve taken up eyebrow pencil and lipstick. Two things I never used. But as I age, my lips and my eyebrows disappear.
I love my gray, silver, and white hair. I am especially so at my temples. In the Cherokee tradition, these are known as Wisdom Locks. Yes. I have developed some wisdom over the years. Good thing. Had I continued my merry destructive way, I wouldn’t have lived this long.
I may be invisible to the younguns and men, but I am visible to myself. Perhaps for the first time, I know and understand who I am. I have grown to accept my foibles while still working to fix the worst of my traits. Wearing makeup, fake nails, gaudy jewelry, and ridiculous shoes, I shall not go gently into that good night. I have too much good going on to stop now.
In my late 30s, I used to say that I was done. I was not suicidal, but I felt like I had done what I had been put here to do. I felt like it was time for me to move on to the next life. I think God recycles.
I still think we have a next life to go to and I’m looking forward to it, but oh I want to be here as long as I can be the self I’ve grown to be. I have so much to live for. There is so much I still want to do, go, see.
We live in turbulent times, but life at its core is still sweet. And I want it all.
W. Va. Fur and Root 