Candy with a Twist (and a Stinger)

As a general rule, I don’t begin sentences with the phrase “as a general rule.”  Today, I make exception.

Here goes.

As a general rule, scorpions are not my first craving when I think of sweets.  I am a more traditional, REESE’S Peanut Butter Cup guy.   I will admit to an occasional yen for black licorice ice cream—something that induces shuddering in more than a few people around me.

Scorpion candies are, as they say in my hometown of East Helena, Montana, “a whole ‘nuther thing.”

Yesterday, while I, that girl, little Miss Mackenna, and her parents were on an outing in the city of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, we stopped at a candy store called Mr. Bulky’s Foods.  The place was wall to wall candy.  Most of the candy is sold in bulk form and is measured by the pound.  You stroll amid bins filled with hard candies and chocolates and toffees and anything you might imagine.  All arranged in festive rainbows of color.

Until you reach the bugs.

Bam!

There they are, right in your face.  Crickets.  Mealworms.  Ants.  Scorpions.

I am not opposed to eating bugs (feel free to step in with a comment here, Alan B).  I have, at various points in my life, eaten: common house flies, ants, moths, crickets, coconut worms, and I once got the taste of a boxelder bug when one inadvertently crashed inside my open mouth.

Note: boxelder bugs are wholly unpalatable.

I must admit.  I was tempted to purchase a box of crickets.  They are not bad eating.   And, for a minute, I even debated buying a scorpion sucker just because the opportunity seemed so rare and exciting.

In the end, I settled for capturing some photographs with my smarter-than-me-phone.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Xylophobia

For devout Christians, as proclaimed in Proverbs, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  For a bumbling troll like me, misspelling the word xylophone is also a pretty good start.

When I threw myself at the internet to check out “xylophone” the other day, I discovered “xylophobia” and, in the process, learned something.

Xylophobia is, by definition, “the irrational fear of wooden objects or forests.”

“Irrational” is the tricky part here.

Maybe fearing a child’s wooden rocking horse or a highly polished mahogany salad bowl is somewhere in the range of irrational, but I think the haunted forest in the Wizard of Oz was pretty darned scare-worthy.  I would place a “rational” sticker on fearing that.   I am also not crazy about wooden marionettes.  I especially dislike dancing skeletons because—you know what?—they are skeletons and they are dancing.

That just ain’t natural!

As I sit here thinking about this, I am also afraid of a certain kind of stick.  I discovered one of these sticks in a pine forest many years ago when, for reasons not clear to me now, I and my friend, Mark, engaged in a stick-throwing war.  Clearly, we should have better defined the size of sticks allowed for throwing long before our first (and last) battle.  I really wish I could tell you that I “was just a dumb kid” and didn’t know better, but I was nineteen or twenty at the time.

For a while we had big fun.  We flung sticks at the trees behind which each of us stood in tight profile, hiding.  Some sticks cracked solid against our trees, shattering into a spray of splinters.  Hooray for that!  Some sticks whoof-whoofed past our protective trees, end-over-end, and fomped harmlessly against the understory at some distance beyond.

I discovered the sort of stick that scares me when I decided to peek out from behind my tree and see if Mark had slipped behind a new tree.  The sort of stick I am talking about is about eighteen inches long, a bit under two inches in diameter, and it is three feet from your face—streaking at you—when you poke your head out from behind a tree.

The stick caught me square in the forehead, end first.  I don’t recall any particular sound upon impact.  I simply recall gasping before I fell into an enormous black void.

Mark was very excited when I fluttered back up into the light from the void.  “You broke the stick with your head, Kidd!” he exclaimed.  He held the stick before me.  He may even have been a little concerned for my welfare.  “But you have a cut on your forehead.”

Sure enough, I was bleeding.  I had broken the stick.  My head thumped with pain.  In a normal setting I likely would have gone to the emergency room for stitches, but we were hours from town.

Here we are, all these years later, and I still have that damned stick.  I carried it out with me that day.  Today, you can find it at the bottom of a dresser drawer in what was once my daughter’s bedroom.  I keep it as a good reminder of something…I just can’t remember what.      

-- Mitchell Hegman

Welcome to Mackenna World

We stayed last night with little Miss Mackenna.  I slept on a sofa in the living room (by choice, thank you).  This morning, before I begin my day with her, I thought I would post a photograph of exactly what I saw when I first opened my eyes this morning.

Welcome to Mackenna World!

-- Mitchell Hegman

Here’s What We Did Yesterday

We poked a big cow-shaped button that makes “moo” sounds.  We bounced airy balls off our heads.  We climbed two steps and came backwards down.  We said what pigs and owls say—this we did many times.  We played a pull-behind xylophone and a ting-a-ling metal triangle.  We read all kinds of books, some with pages thick as spoon handles; some with flip-ups: some with pull-downs. 

And THAT’S A BIRD!   

Some of us took photographs while some of us wore our boots on our hands.

We drank “monee,” which you call “milk.”

We played with the dog we named “Gentle” because that’s what Momma and Daddy say when the dog comes near.

These are the things we do on our very best day.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Awakening

I come awake amid a pile of fluffy bedding that might be first cousin to a French dessert.  The room is under assault from full daylight.  The lamp normally at my bedside has been removed.  Gone, too, the nightstand.  Walls the wrong color.

I cautiously rub at my eyes which feel, peculiarly enough, like rough gravel underfoot.

Only then does a wave of recognition wash over me.  I have come alive in Ohio this morning.

Ohio is quite handsome in its own way.  Fifty degrees warmer than the one degree and heavy snow I experienced on the mountain pass before I descended to my cabin only two mornings ago.  Half the trees still display patchworks of leaves twirling from red to orange.  Tended green lawns from end to end.

But Ohio is also strange.  Driving from place to place after our arrival last evening, we whisked past a fast food drive-up at regular two-minute intervals.  Highways assault highways here.  Sometimes, you might look up in the air and see the Goodyear blimp.  Birds here are incurious and fly away from you instead of toward you.      

Soon we will drive amid the trees and lawns and fast food outlets and assaulting highways to see the brightest, smartest, cutest granddaughter on this side of wherever I am.

Thing is, she is talking now, and if she calls me Papa I am likely to melt and stick there for good.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Winter at the Cabin

I have a confession to make.  Some of you may not like it, either.

Here it is: I like winter.

I love how snow stacks atop fenceposts creating tophats made of pure cotton.  I like how the whole landscape becomes whitewashed, how the sky color-shifts so blue you want to poke it to see if it’s real.  I like seeing small creeks grow scales of ice before they burrow themselves underneath crescent drifts of snow.  I love how sounds are hushed.  I enjoy seeing the crisscross tracks of animals where they have come and gone.

Sure, I tire of the cold.  I would like a month less of winter.  But I love it just the same.

Yesterday, I drove to the cabin where winter has arrived in full.  I had to drop my truck into four-wheel drive and then kick and buck my way in from the main road.

Once there, I took the opportunity to burn a chest-high tangle of branches I stacked in the meadow after knocking down a couple snags this summer.

A chickadee flew in and perched in a nearby tree and watched for a while.

Fire, sky, snow, and occasionally a bird.

These are elements in the winter.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Russian Olive

The note said only this:

Knock down the tree.

You read the note,

pressed it into the palm of my hand, asking,

“Which tree?”

I considered.

We had a job to do. Saws, axes, fuel, shovels in the bed or our truck.

“One of the three trillion trees inhabiting this planet,” I suggested.

We debated while sitting in our work truck.

Living tree or dead?

We started a list: sugar pine, magnolia, quaking aspen,

White oak, golden willow, yew…

“Maybe something with thorns,” you suggested.

Russian olive.

We drove ‘til we spotted one,

off-green, branches distorted as if one-hundred years arthritic.

Maybe ugly.

You tore into the gnarled trunk with your chainsaw until,

with a cracking noise,

pure sunlight pushed the olive down.

We further disassembled the tree,

Snapping off smaller branches with gloved hands, axing the bigger.

“Is it the thorns that made this tree bad?” I asked.

“Nope.  Was the boss that made it bad.  Maybe us.”

-- Mitchell Hegman