Anne Denton

As we advance through this adventure called life, there are certain uncomfortable truths that soon become evident—like death.  From a fairly early age, we come to understand that there will most likely people we know and love who will take the path to the afterlife without us.  None of us is immune.  The Grim Reaper eventually catches up to all of us.

Grant and I have been fortunate to have our parents with us into our middle age.  There are some longevity genes in there so hopefully they’ll stick around a little longer.  Both of my parents’ mothers lived well into their nineties, and Grant had a Grandmother who made it to 102.

Funny how you form ideas in your mind, without even consciously thinking about it, regarding who you expect to live the longest. One of my grandmothers was a person I always expected to die young.  Every time we turned around, she was being rushed to the hospital, and I can’t say how many times my parents grimly informed me that we needed to go say goodbye, because Grammie wasn’t going to be with us much longer.

Yet somehow the old girl always rallied, and she ended up living well into her nineties.  She was one of those amazing individuals who were living life large all the way to the end.   Perhaps it was the constant specter of death hanging over her that gave her the zest for living.

My Mom, who was always hyper and healthy and jumping rope well into her sixties, is the one I figured would live to be 120.  I often told Grant she would probably bury us all.  Yet she has recently had some scary health issues that have caused us all to sit up and wonder if the world has turned completely upside-down.

We expect those older than us to go first, like our grandparents.  After that you face the sad fact that you will most likely outlive your parents, as well.  But somehow you think your friends are going to be right there with you to the bitter end.

One of my best friends was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.  She is that person, the one who is bouncing off the walls, running, biking, sailing and the absolute picture of health.  When I first heard the news, the denial kicked in, because of all the people I might have expected to get cancer, it wasn’t her.

As a nation, we’ve been fighting wars for over two hundred years.  In recent times, it has become fashionable to fight wars against non-human entities, like the war on drugs or the war on terror.  Was it Nixon back in the seventies who first started talking about the war on cancer?

I was a teenager in the seventies, and now I’m a middle-aged grandmother.  Is it just me, or does it seems like the war on cancer has been a big frigging flop?  In fact, everything I read seems to point to the fact that cancer rates are actually going up at an alarming rate.  Seems like anyone who lives long enough eventually gets cancer.

I wonder if cave men had to deal with the beast?  Thinking about it, I was able to come up with a long list of things that killed cave men; getting eaten by a saber tooth tiger or other large predator.  Being accidently (or not) shot by a compatriot during a mammoth hunt.  Being stepped on by a mammoth during a mammoth hunt.  Being strangled by your cave-wife after coming home empty-handed from the mammoth hunt because she has been cooped up in the cave with six hungry whining cave kids for two weeks and is convinced you were just out whooping it up with the guys instead of getting down to the serious business of bringing mammoth-meat home to the family.

I’m sure bad teeth, infection, disease, the occasional bout of appendicitis and, oh yes, childbirth took out most cave people before they got old enough to think about getting cancer.

But then, cave people didn’t have Monsanto or DuPont or Exxon to deal with.  There were no genetically modified anything, no antibiotics or hormones in the mammoth meat.  Their water was clean, their air was clean, and they weren’t bombarded on a daily basis with a noxious cocktail of toxic chemicals.

They also didn’t have drug companies.  I guess these companies justify charging a sick and dying person $5,000 a month for a handful of pills (an atrocity I just heard about yesterday) because their shareholders are making money……

It is puzzling to me how what we consider a technologically advanced society who has been waging a war on a disease for forty years can’t come up with anything better than poisoning the patient, burning (radiation) or cutting.  It makes the cave people look modern by comparison.

I did hear years ago about a guy who supposedly cured himself of cancer with humor.  He just sat down in front of the TV and started watching funny movies.  Anything that would make him laugh.  He eventually licked the disease and lived long enough to write about his experience.

I’m sure the quacks are going to have their way with my friend.  She will probably have to endure the path many before her have endured.  But she is strong and has a great support system, so I expect her to breeze through it and be around twenty years from now to tell the story.

In the meantime, I’d appreciate hearing from anyone what they consider the funniest movie they’ve ever watched.  I’m starting a collection for my friend.

Spring has finally arrived and with it the need to start the process of moving north.  We’ll harness Sophie (my Yukon) to the ‘ol covered wagon and begin the long trek to Montana.

The house is still on the market.  Our new Realtor swooped in like a drill sergeant and whipped everything into shape.  Part of the process was to have it “staged.”  For the uninitiated, staging involves paying a person a sum of money to come in, hide all your stuff where you’ll never be able to find it, and bring in a bunch of replacement, non-functional stuff to clutter your space.

It takes me three times as long to get out the door these days, as everything has to be in place on the outside chance someone decides they just have to see the house today.  Tucker’s toys get stashed, the tomatoes can’t sit on the counter any more, even though that’s what’s best for tomatoes (I’ve determined that a tomato’s needs are pretty far down the pole in this process), and all the lids on the toilets must be closed.  Heaven forbid someone’s gaze falls on the apparition of an open toilet.

The leaves that have a habit of collecting on the porch by the front door during wind storms (its spring in New Mexico, do the math), need to be swept into the yard, where they’ll lay in wait for the next wind storm.  One of our friends came over last week and on entering the house proclaimed that it didn’t look like anybody lived here.  She’s pretty much right.  I don’t think you can call this existence “living.”

The only one happy about the arrangement is Tucker, who is riding the anti-dog-in-the-house wave by getting to tag along on every trip to town.  He’s finally getting the drill down with all the rushing around at the last minute, but the second we’re back in the house, he’s at the cabinet asking for his toys back.

It will be such a relief to leave the museum behind and be able to actually live in our house again.  Looks like we’ll spend next winter working on the remodeling project at Bull Lake, because there won’t be much else to do with the 3 hours of daylight in northern Montana, and piles of wet snow.

First order of business though will be to get the fruit and nut trees into the ground.  They are supposed to show up the week of April 8, and it will probably take us that whole week to get everything planted.  Over dinner with friends the other night, they commented that in the event the world comes to an end, they want to be able to find us since we’ll be the ones with food.  I told them I hoped they like fruit and nuts.  The only other sure thing right now is wild game and cattails.  I understand there are a number of tasty ways to eat cattails, and I intend to try all of them.

We’ve been getting the newspaper for the little town near our farm, and the articles are quite refreshing.  Instead of murders, rapes and meth labs, the front page features stories on large flocks of wild turkey’s eating some guy’s grain, or the fact that the annual swan migration is a little late this year.  There are weekly comments on the snow pack, the runoff, and the huckleberry crop, depending on the time of year.  What a concept.  Oz, here we come.

The little local feed co-op is getting in their chicks next week.  It takes every ounce of self-control I’ve got not to run in and buy one of each.  But Grant and I have a pact that no livestock will be allowed permanent residence on the farm until we are permanent residents on the farm.  Still doesn’t stop me from poring over the Craigslist ads every night and looking at every Jersey milk cow.  The thought of fresh butter melting on a slice of homemade bread is making my mouth water at this moment.

All my classes are over.  I missed the last one, which was a workshop on grafting fruit trees.  The kids kindly shared a nasty case of the stomach flu with me over the weekend, and I was too weak to get out of bed and drive the two hours to the class.  Grant looked a little like the proverbial deer in the headlights when I informed him he would have to go in my place, but he was a trooper.  When he returned home that evening, a little wind-burned, a little sun-burned and clearly tired, he had five tiny fruit trees to show for his effort, and the skill to produce many, many more.

Since the Federal Government is incapable of making a decision, Grant will most likely continue to work through the summer, with some commuting back and forth and using vacation.  He’ll be doing the bachelor thing for the most part while in New Mexico.  Guess I need to make a run to Costco to stock up on popcorn and Mountain Dew, which is Grant’s idea of sustenance when I’m not around to do the cooking.

My head is already spinning with all the doors that are opening as others are slamming shut.  I’m definitely not the person I was a year ago, nor would I want to be!  I’m meeting the most interesting and amazing people on this journey, and I can’t wait to see what the next phase will bring.

More from Montana……..

For the first time in six years, I feel moved to write a Christmas letter. Up until 2006, it had been a yearly event, a way to keep family and friends in the loop with what was going on in our busy lives.

But in 2007 we lost our nephew Travis in August, and as the holidays approached along with the time to send out my cards, I realized I was still in a dark place, the hole in my heart was still aching, and I had nothing positive I wanted to say about the year, so I let it pass, preferring to stay mute rather than spread sadness and pain.

That year started a process which is almost indescribable. It is hard to believe it has taken this six years to come to a place of healing over that death, but also a transformation in my spirit. I think at some point when faced with these life challenges, you have to make a choice. Are you going to dwell on the death or celebrate the life that came before it? My brother and sister-in-law have been amazing role models to me during this process, as they have shown immeasurable strength and grace in their ability to continue to honor their son while slowing rebuilding their own lives.

My own path has taken me on an inward journey. There is nothing like the death of a young person to make you take stock of your own life, to examine not only your decisions, your acts and the life you have built, but especially your relationships. During hours of contemplation and some very difficult self-evaluation, there were many aspects of myself I discovered for which I was not very proud. I realized I’d drifted away from my brothers as an adult, thinking I had nothing in common with them. Yet eventually I realized we had everything in common. We share more than our DNA, we share our earliest life’s memories and experiences, the things that helped to mold us into the people we ultimately have become.

I have wasted countless years on judgment, criticism and an insatiable drive for more and bigger and better. Life has a way of holding a mirror to your face and I discovered that, if I looked closely, the things I criticized in others were the things I secretly found most lacking in myself. I also came to realize how meaningless the “stuff” had become. Compared to the knowledge you will never hold a loved one in your arms again, the latest electronic wing ding becomes more of a speed bump to self-actualization than a treasured possession.

Being a little thick, it has taken these six years to re-evaluate my life, my relationships and try to define my purpose—the proverbial “Why am I Here?” This journey has brought challenges as many of you have shaken your head and asked, “Who are you and what have you done with Anne?” The good thing about losing your mind is it gives you a clean slate on which to rebuild. With the help of our beloved family counselor, Carryn, I have tried not to waste this opportunity.

Looking back on the past six years, I see many examples of the changes in me—foundational character transformations. I let go of a large project that was near and dear to my heart when I saw that it risked a treasured friendship. I’ve made a concentrated effort to renew my relationship with my brothers. I’ve forgiven those in my life for whom I’d carried a perception that I had been wronged in some way, and striven to see the relationship through the clarity of compassion.

After years of making fun of little dogs, I found myself the owner of one. He has been both companion and comfort during some difficult times. I have spent the last two to three years literally and figuratively cleaning house—boxing up and giving away as much as I can, clearing out the clutter in my house, my life, my mind. It has been surprisingly liberating!

After the shock of watching someone I loved lose a child wore off, there was a selfish part of me that realized I had only one child, and the idea of losing her is inconceivable. We’ve had two close calls in the last year and a half, and both have brought me to a greater understanding of the importance of living and experiencing each moment of now, eschewing the temptation to obsess about the past or worry about the future.

I watched helplessly, the day of Lorelei’s birth, while my daughter traveled with her unborn child to a dangerous precipice. Infinite moments passed while they couldn’t even get a blood pressure reading during an episode that eventually caused her to deliver the baby eight weeks early. That evening I gazed for the first time on my tiny granddaughter who, at less than four pounds was literally fighting for her life, and knew once again how lucky I was to be there, to participate in a love so great it pushes the bounds of eternity. After leaving the hospital, I traveled home to my husband and grandson. Folding them into my arms made me complete and I will never forget that feeling of being connected to all things.

Recently, when my darling daughter was diagnosed with cervical cancer, the clutch in my gut, the fear monster was back. Once again we were blessed with a miracle. The beast was caught early and she is going to be okay. I am slowly finding a way to use these challenges as a vehicle for growth and a reason to embrace the healing power of gratitude.

The past is history, and the future is a great unknown.

I humbly realize I am still a newbie on this spiritual journey. Old habits, as they say, die hard, and attempting to change a lifetime of those habits is a daunting task. Some days I see the old me creeping back, the one I don’t like very much. But if I have learned one thing from all this, it is that the most difficult person for whom to have compassion and understanding is myself. Until I forgive myself, I’ll never be able to move on.

There have been rewards for the hard work. Tiny slivers of light have appeared in the cracks of my old life. Peeking into the future, I’m excited by what lays ahead. The great gears of the Universe are creaking, and I am slowly working free of the muck that has kept me rooted to that life. New and interesting people are appearing almost daily, and for the first time in many years, I feel passionate about the things I’m learning and the life Grant and I are building together.

I’ve taken a break from writing since last spring. Once we move, I intend to dive in again, documenting our adventure as it unfolds. Stay tuned for the next chapter.

Everyone thinks I’m crazy. Not just a little on the tweaked side, but undeniably, certifiably nuts. I guess I can’t really blame them. From their perspective, it must seem like Grant and I have lost our ever loving minds. We’re selling our home of thirty-three years in the middle of one of the worst real estate markets of modern times. We’re moving thirteen hundred miles away from family and lifetime friends. At the age most people are thinking about retirement and maybe buying a motorhome and taking up golf, we’re buying an eighty-acre farm and planning to grow everything we use, including crops to produce our own alcohol fuel.

My friends have found many ways of expressing their displeasure at these ideas. Seems I can’t have a conversation with anyone any more without the subject coming up. We’re abandoning our daughter and her kids. We’re making a serious mistake from a financial standpoint. We’re too old. We have no idea what we’re getting ourselves in for. It will be a lot of work. We know nothing about farming. The list of arguments goes on and on. It never ceases to amaze me how much everyone knows the intimate details of our lives, and the compulsion they feel to point out our mistakes and shortcomings.

The problem is, we’re not dead yet. It would be very convenient if we were, because then the arguments would stop, and the idea would become moot.

There are many documented cases of people retiring healthy, and subsequently die within a year or two. It’s as if they’ve lost whatever it was that made them get up in the morning.

I believe each of us comes to Earth with a spark inside of us. This tiny light contains our life blood, our soul, the cosmic stuff that makes each of us who we are. In my mind, we all come into this incarnation with a purpose.

I’ve gotten into the trap many times over the years of believing this purpose has to be something “big” like finding a cure for cancer, writing the next great novel, or discovering new frontiers. But I’ve come to understand, over time, that each of us is contributing to “all there is” by simply being our authentic selves, whatever that looks like.

If it’s all about contributing to the collective consciousness, isn’t it more important that we be happy than rich, famous or even infamous? Fanning the little light in our soul that whispers to us during those brief moments of bliss each of us is destined to experience brings forth not only more of the same, but others of like mind, strengthening the whole.

When Lisa was in high school I remember her constantly talking about the “popular” kids. She often said, “Everyone hates the popular kids.”

So I’d naturally ask, “If everyone hates them, how can they be popular?”

Her reply? “Oh Mom, you just don’t get it.”

I didn’t get a lot of things when Lisa was a teenager. In fact, my I.Q. dropped into the double digits by the time she hit about sixteen, and didn’t go up again until she got married and started having her own kids. Funny how smart I seem to be now. But I digress.

Many of us spent our years in middle school and high school trying to be the “popular kids” that everyone else hated. What a noble pursuit. “Who are we?” was a question that never entered our adolescent brain.

Deepok Chopra tells us that, before we meditate, we should ask three questions:

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What is my Dharma?

The term “Dharma” refers to our purpose.

I’ve spent my entire life doing what everyone thinks I should do. When you’re a kid, of course, you’re essentially tied to your parents and their plans for you. Don’t get me wrong; I had great parents and I know they always had my best interests at heart.

But you leave home and there are all these expectations from your society and culture. You go to college, you get your degree, you get married, have a couple of kids, work for “The Company” for forty years, retire and move to Florida. Sound familiar?

Short of flying, I never had a job I even liked, let alone loved. Even my airline career was fraught with uncertainty. There was the thousand mile commute every week, union battles, bankruptcies, and let’s not forget 9/11. I’d personally flown both of the United airplanes involved. It was my fleet, my friends and co-workers who woke up that morning thinking it was going to be just another day at work. Had I not had the “good fortune” to be on jury duty, it might have been me.

But it wasn’t.

I’ve spent over fifty years hiding my little spark behind the proverbial bush. It’s hard to hear the tiny voice within when the roar of “shoulds” drown out the authenticity of your very soul. Most of us never recognize who we are. We follow the rules of our culture, walk the line, do our duty and die.

At the end of the day, it’s not the money you make, the novels you write or the frontiers you challenge. Its figuring out who you are and living that in each eternal moment. People think we have to have these extraordinary experiences to validate our lives.

I have had many extraordinary experiences. I’ve stood on a 15,000 foot pass on the Inca trail and seen things few modern humans have seen. I’ve scuba-dived reefs with fifty-foot tall coral heads and commanded a six hundred thousand pound jet at thirty-nine thousand feet.

Yet when I look back on my life, the most extraordinary memory is the sight of my newborn grandson as he blinked at the world for the first time. The miracle of my own daughter when they placed her in my arms, or my tiny granddaughter who entered this world just under four pounds.

Its the lines on my parents face etched with years of struggle and wisdom, the sight of the American flag which brings tears to my eyes when I think about the struggles, challenges and sacrifices thousands of our fellow Americans made for our freedom.

It is the arms of a child around my neck, the first flower of spring and the way it smells after a rain.  In the end, it really is the things that are free, the miracles we take for granted every day that sing to our soul, connect us all and speak to who we really are.

I can’t wait to get my hands in the soil. I can’t wait to sit on the porch at the end of a day of manual labor, reveling in the fatigue of a good honest day’s work as I watch the ducks and geese come in for a landing on the pond. I can’t wait to hear the frogs at night and show my grandson where to dig the worms for fishing and taste the tang of an apple whose tree I fostered for years.

Am I crazy? Probably. Am I happy? Blissfully. I wish this for everyone, that we all find the tiny light inside and fan it into the flame of potential. We really do only live once; or so they say. I’m not banking on reincarnation. I’ve got a few years left. Gonna make them count.

Today’s my Mom’s birthday.  It’s caused me to pause and reflect both on what it means to be a mom, and what me and my brothers put my poor mom through over the years.

We moved to the mountains when I was five years old.  I remember Mom telling a friend one of the main reasons they decided to make the move was so the “noise,” (aka us kids) would not bother the neighbors.

She gave up a lot as far as support system and convenience to give us the opportunity to yell and holler and be kids.  Then there was the issue of my brother roaring up and down our road in his Formula One style go-cart singing opera at the tops of his lungs.  The noise-making didn’t stop there.  We had all manner of motorized contraptions, from Vespas to dirt bikes.

There was always a gaggle of kids at our house, and I’m sure the din was deafening.  Mom’s cooking was legendary, and she always had a plate of cookies or a pan of fudge ready.  One of my brothers once sold the piece of cherry nut cake she’d sent in his lunch box for a whopping fifty cents, which in the mid-sixties was a fortune to a kid.

The frogs came and laid their eggs in a nearby stock pond each summer, and we’d catch the tadpoles and “raise” them in my brother’s wagon, which we’d turned into a makeshift pond on the patio.  Before long, she’d have little frogs hopping around her house.  In the winter, Dad sprayed the patio with water and turned it into a skating rink.  We’d take the dinette chairs from the kitchen and use them for balance, pushing them around our little skating rink while learning to stand.

I am an animal-lover and would catch the little field mice who got trapped in the grain barrel, and bring them inside, where they’d virtually always escape.  We’d hear the little critters scurrying through the walls in the evenings.  I’m sure that put a little silver in her hair.

We were always dragging poor Mom into some fiasco, like the time we decided to go skating at Seven Springs, and convinced her she needed to teach us to skate backwards.  New Mexico has rocks in the ice, unlike her native Maine, and hitting one going backwards on skates at twenty-miles per hours tends to have consequences.

She was never a horse person, but always had a carrot or a sugar cube for my horse when she stuck her head through the dining room door at the end of a ride.

One day, as a teenager, I was sassing her in the kitchen while she was trying to chop carrots.  She got to upset and distracted by the argument she chopped the end of her finger off instead, and not knowing what else to do, I picked up the end of her finger, loaded her in the car and drove like a maniac all the way to the local veterinarian’s office.  She never complained.

Or the time I ran a stop sign right in front of a cop, and when he pulled me over, I burst into tears and declared that “Dad is going to kill me.”  Mom and the cop both assured me that Dad would never have to know as long as I promised never again to run a stop sign.

She’s the neatest, cleanest, and most particular person I’ve ever met when it comes to her house, so all the projects we dragged into her den must have set her teeth on edge.  We cut up parachutes, cleaned saddles and assembled motorcycles in that room.  She never complained.

When we were little, money was tight, and Dad often worked two or three jobs to put groceries on the table.  Mom could stretch a turkey leg to three meals, and you’d feel like you were eating like a king.  I know there were times she did without so we wouldn’t have to.  It wasn’t until I was a mom myself that I realized how broke we were in those early years.

She always made our favorite cake on our birthday, and we got to lick the bowl.  Then we’d get to pick what to have for supper and who to invite.  There was always a stack of presents, and they were always exactly what we wanted.

She went back to school when I hit Junior High, and got her degree in teaching.  There is a whole generation of Cedar Crest kids who had her in the second grade still writing to her from far-off places, visiting her in Montana, and bragging that “Mrs. Netz” was the best teacher they ever had.  It was always more than teaching to her, and we often had extra kids at the dinner table she’d dragged home because they were hungry, or their dad was in jail, or some other calamity had befallen them.

When me and my brothers had our own kids, she slid right into the role of “Grammie,” and the next generation of our family got to fall in love with her.  She always reminded me of a mother hen with chicks, with all the grandkids clamoring around her for attention, and her clucking at them, and feeding them goodies.  She’s always made her own bread, and somehow always managed to time it so that the bread was just coming out of the oven when the kids showed up.  She had miniature loaf pans so the kids could have their own little loaves.  We’d all sit around the table breathing in the yeasty warmth and licking the butter off our fingers while exclaiming that “Grammie bread is the best.”

In her forties, my brother set her up with a cast off computer and she taught herself to type, then wrote and published a cook book.  She never ceases to amaze me.

If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never come close to the person my Mom is.  She is more than a Mom.  She’s a mentor, an icon, and I’m proud to call her my best friend.  She’s my moral compass and my confidant.  We definitely won the Mom lottery when God gave us this assignment.

I could go on for days with stories, but what I really wanted to do was just tell her how much I love her, appreciate and treasure her.

Happy Birthday Mom!

I’ve always thought I was pretty strong. Years ago, as a teenager, I remember hay season with my Dad. Back at our barn, he’d stand on the trailer and, with a hay hook, toss those eighty-pound bales up to me, in the loft. We’d get a rhythm going with me hooking the bale just as he cut it loose. Once he didn’t get the hook out in time, and I dragged him up into the loft, along with the bale.

Fast forward to about six years ago, when my friend Bobbie and I took on the challenge of weight-lifting using “Static Contraction Training.” This involved loading up a weight machine with a ridiculous number of plates, think 800 lbs. for a leg press, and after moving the load a few inches, the goal was to hold it for twenty seconds. We rarely made it through an entire workout without some helpful gym rat asking us if we knew how much weight we had on that machine.

So when another friend heard me squeaking about having spent a winter on my duff and wanting to get back into shape, she suggested I take a “spin class” with her. For the uninitiated, “spinning” involves a group of people on stationary bikes doing an imaginary “ride” which is led by an instructor at the head of the class. How difficult can that be, right?

Digressing to another time I was roped into something like this. Joanie had been wanting to take up Yoga, and asked if I would attend classes with her at a couple different studios around town. The first two or three were about what I expected—skinny “salad people” in tights turning themselves into pretzels. I’m not a pretzel kind of gal; in fact I’m so inflexible, I can’t even touch my toes. But Joanie was having a good time, so I hung in there with her.

Until we landed at the “Bikram Yoga” place. This type of Yoga is done in a room kept at 108 degrees and about 95% humidity. Guess the heat is supposed to warm up your muscles and joints or something—I don’t know. When we checked in for our ninety minute introductory session, the guy at the counter gave us a briefing. He said, “This first time, your goal is to stay in the room. Just stay in the room.”

I remember snorting to myself at such a ridiculously feeble goal. Stay in the room? What kind of foolishness was that?

Joanie and I staked out the place at the back of the class where all the newbies generally congregate at these things. The Yoga master arrived and all the skinny salad-people started doing their pretzel-thing. Fifteen minutes in, slick with sweat, I started noticing the smell. It was a blend of body odor, stinky feet, and mold. I looked at the carpet with suspicion, wondering how many gallons of Yoga-induced body fluids it had absorbed over the years. Suddenly the room felt claustrophobic.

I looked up just in time to see a giant bead of sweat roll down the the Speedo-hugging scrotum of the guy in front of me, and splash onto his mat. I threw up a little bit in my throat. By now the smell was overwhelming, every breath bringing in who knew what killer strain of mold. How many kinds of bacteria and fungus were silently replicating on every nasty, scummy surface? I suddenly remembered that the nasty kind of bugs literally explode their populations in a warm, humid environment.

Was it just me, or was it really hot and hard to breathe? Hopefully, I looked at the clock on the wall behind the instructor. We were now exactly twenty-one minutes into the ninety minute session. I experienced an epiphany about the guy’s recommendation to “just stay in the room.”

I snuck a look at Joanie. She was doing a pretty good “Downward Dog,” considering the problem of traction with sweaty hands on a slippery mat.

Sixty-nine miserable minutes later I staggered out of that room, weak, shaky and dehydrated. In a chirpy voice, Joanie asked me if I wanted to go again the next day. At that moment I wondered, for the first time in a forty-year friendship, if she’d truly lost her mind. It took three days to get the stink out of my sinuses. Years later when I think about it, the memory of that smell comes right back.

Back to the spin class. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the experience, it’s to never accept an invitation to go to a class at a gym with someone who is thin, wiry, and in peak condition. I was sucked in by the fact that this particular friend had been through foot surgery a couple of months back. Believe me, that didn’t slow her down.

Twenty minutes in, my quads were burning, my butt was asleep and I was chugging like a locomotive topping a pass. My friend was up on the pedals pumping out a hill, and had enough extra breath to let out a war hoop. The instructor, sweat pouring off her brow, was imploring the participants to go faster, stronger, harder. The thought running through my mind was, just stay in the room.

I pulled the resistance on the bike back to downhill, and tried to give the illusion that I was still pedaling, although my legs had gone from prickly to completely numb. By the time we climbed off the bikes, I could barely stand. Somehow I got through the post-workout stretch and staggered after my spritely companion into the locker room, where I collapsed on the bench.

Getting old is a bitch. In the immortal words of my great aunt Irma, if I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself!

Having grown up in a family for whom food was not just something, but the thing, its not surprising that, as an adult, I’ve evolved into someone known as a “Foodie.”

I think it started with the sugar substitute “Aspartame.” I’d heard all the rants about the potential dangers of the stuff. But the FDA had declared it safe and, like all government agencies, they have our best interests at heart, right?

I loved Diet Coke and loved even more the fact that I could go to Circle K on a daily basis for a Big Gulp without ever having to worry about one single stinking calorie. What a deal! Until one day at work when we were descending through eighteen thousand feet and my left ear refused to clear.

Five years and tens of thousands of dollars of medical tests later it took a Chinese Acupuncturist to solve the mystery—I was being poisoned.

Since at that time I was worth more to my loving hubby alive than dead, I quickly dropped him as a suspect, and turned to my diet to ferret out the source of ill effects. It didn’t take long to figure out the culprit. My Diet Coke habit had rendered me half-deaf and ultimately ended my career as an airline pilot.

Nothing like being lied to by a government agency, and having life-altering consequences to put you on the war path. My problem wasn’t just that I’d given up the evil Aspartame, and wanted everybody in the world to know the truth—I took it as a personal insult each time I saw someone imbibing the stuff. Even though I’d gulped it for years, oblivious to the wreckage it wreaks on everything from your brain to your reproductive system, I realized that once you know something you can never not-know it again. But that doesn’t mean everyone else knows it.

From Aspartame I moved on to the evils of trans-fats, high fructose corn syrup, explored the heartbreak of gluten and dairy intolerance and have landed firmly in “Non-GMO Land.”

Now a good fifteen years down the road, we are selling our family home of thirty-two years and moving to the far side of the country in search of clean water, and clean land on which to grow clean food.

I devour (no pun intended) anything related to food and health and after reading about all the delightful benefits of raw milk, was appalled to discover the sale of it is outlawed in our county. There is a hardy group in Albuquerque who pool resources and make a driving foray to Durango, Colorado every week for the pleasure of spending twelve dollars a gallon for raw milk. If you add the price of the round trip, it’s probably more like twenty.

Yet these people are desperate for real food and willing to do almost anything to get it.

The other day my niece gave me some eggs from her chickens. When I cracked one into a frying pan, I didn’t even recognize it as what I have come to know as an egg. The yolk was bright yellow and standing proudly at attention; the white was clear and firm. And the taste was divine. I’m sure there were also unseen health benefits from a food derived from birds allowed to express their birdness and who are given clean and species-appropriate food.

Watching documentaries like Food, Inc., would make even the strongest among us gag with disgust seeing the way chickens, eggs and beef are produced on a “production” scale. Heck, even the farmers are appalled. It would all make you want to be a vegetarian, until they go onto the second half of the program, where you are briefed on the development of “FrankenFoods” whose birthplace is the lab, and final resting place our plate at the dinner table. Cross-species breeding of plants and things like viruses and bacteria to make the plant able to withstand being hosed down by herbicides.

Even if you ignore the fact that our depleted soils have a small fraction of the minerals our ancestors enjoyed in the last century, this new “version” of “food” is, by processing, literally void of nutrients. Tomatoes are now bred not for nutritional value or even taste, but for their ability to survive a fifteen-hundred mile ride across the country in the back of the truck and still look like a tomato after sitting on the shelf at the local grocery store for a week.

How is it that our generation of Americans has more food than any society in the history of the planet, yet is plagued by not only the rising incidence of chronic illness to epidemic proportions, but the introduction of scary new diseases.

Trillions of dollars are plowed into medical research annually, and new drugs come on the market almost daily, but for most, the side effects are worse than the cure.

Lisa pointed out recently that my husband’s parents have been closet Foodies for years. While I was still chugging my Diet Cokes, they were quietly buying organic food, avoiding wheat and soy, and mostly eating simple meals at home. They’re both in their eighties now, and enjoy an incredible level of health. They’re slim, energetic, and as far as I can tell don’t have a single ache or pain. My father-in-law walks his three miles every day, rain or shine, and will probably outlast us all.

That’s where I want to be at eighty. If getting up every morning at 5:00 am to milk the cow doesn’t kill me, I hope to coast into my eighties drinking my raw milk, watching my happy chickens scratching around the yard and eating my home-grown veggies. At least I’ll know where they came from!

Got my wisdom teeth out last week. That brings the total number of teeth extracted from my mouth to a whopping eight. I opened wide today in front of the mirror and tried to imagine another eight teeth in there. Looks pretty crowded as it is.

I had four removed when I got my braces, and a few years after that lost one of the upper wisdom’s to an infection. Last week the final three fell to the whims of a biological dentist who insisted they were just going to give me trouble.

Isn’t it amazing how we humans can remove all sorts of parts and still manage life just fine? I guess there are some parts, like your liver that are pretty important. Lose your liver, lose your life. But rupture your spleen in an accident and they just take that puppy out and the next week you’re truckin’ along, with nary a care in the world.

Then there’s the appendix. That one is so common, its hard to find people who haven’t had it out. Both my brothers have. The younger of the two, who is a little hard-core anyway, did a twenty-eight mile hike like three days after his surgery. Course he’s also the one who just got through climbing Mt. McKinley for the third time, at the advanced age of fifty-eight. Some people.

I lost my uterus when I was still in my thirties. With the exception of my darling daughter, that sucker had given me nothing but trouble. Can’t say I miss it. The ovaries went with it. I did miss them, when I had to start slapping an Estrogen patch on my back twice a week to avoid menopause at thirty-six. The upside to that whole event was how much better Grant and Lisa said they liked me after the surgery. I was apparently a “much nicer person.” Its pretty hard to work up raging hormones with nothing more than an Estrogen patch.

All this makes me wonder why we even have these parts if we can do without them. If my extra teeth are “just going to cause problems,” why did God design me that way? And if the gall bladder is completely disposable, what’s it doing there in the first place? I drive myself crazy with these kinds of questions.

Since I’m on a roll, I guess we should address the concept of adding parts or replacing parts. Its rare nowadays to find anyone over the age of seventy who’s not sporting at least one titanium joint. The procedure is practically a day surgery now. People bring it up casually in conversation, as if it’s no bigger deal than getting the oil changed in their car– “I’m getting my knee done next week.”

Even Tucker has a plate and six screws in his pelvis. We figured out today that even in terms of dog years, he hasn’t yet made it out of his teens. I keep waiting for him to ring the buzzer on the airport security scanner, but the microscopically tiny amount of metal in his hip must not be enough to build a weapon or a bomb big enough to take down an airplane. The traveling public is safe from Tucker, at least for the time being.

And while people like me are taking teeth out, others are getting new ones put back in. I watched my poor Mom suffer with a bridge and a partial plate for years. These days, they’d just make her a new tooth and screw it directly into the bone.

Have you seen the latest in hair replacement? Not only do they have all sorts of drugs and creams to make the hair grow, they are implanting “plugs” of hair from other parts of the body, into the skin on the scalp. It looks a little like “Barbie scalp,” but hey, I guess it beats a comb-over or a sunburned pate.

Hopefully I’m done with my teeth. I’m pretty happy with the ones that are left. The dentist and the oral surgeon are not griping about any of them. The troublemakers are gone and don’t need to be replaced. I’m going to do my best to keep what parts I have left. I’m pretty attached to them.

With today being Superbowl Sunday, I have to admit that sporting events such as this, or specifically the human behavior related to sporting events such as this, completely baffle me. The last football game I watched from beginning to end was from the bleachers at my high school in 1976. The only reason I could be found at that game was the fact I was a member of the Manzano High School Marching Band, and one of our obligations was to show up at the games and make a lot of noise.

I hesitate to call what I produced from my horn during those games “music.” Nobody cared about quality, they just wanted loud. There wasn’t even much marching involved. If it was a home game, we’d get out on the field and do the obligatory show while all the died-in-the-wool football fans were in the toilet, buying hot dogs, or retrieving something they forgot from their car. The only people watching the band were the long-suffering band parents who’d most likely showed up just for half-time and would be leaving after helping to disassemble and pack up all the “pit” equipment.

I enjoy watching the Superbowl commercials, even if I don’t catch them during the Superbowl. Most of them are available on YouTube these days, and it gives the Morning Shows something to talk about the week prior.

I ride the Superbowl wave in other ways as well—last week Costco was in sample overdrive with their Superbowl fare. Without ever having to attend a party or buy a single bag of chips, I enjoyed a literal smorgasbord of wings, fried mozzarella sticks, mini-quiche and other unhealthy but delicious snacks.

I somehow managed to find and marry a man who has the same disdain for televised sporting events. While all of his buddies are gathering today eat too much junk food, drink too much beer, and yell and cheer at men they’ve never met on a two-dimensional screen, he’s doing his usual weekend puttering, knocking things off the “Honey-do” list, which is contributing vastly to marital harmony.

The only thing I can think of more boring than football, is watching golf on TV. You don’t even get the cheering crowd effect, just a commentator speaking in hushed tones, and some poor cameraman doing his best to following the trajectory of a tiny white ball while it flies towards a slightly larger tiny hole in the ground.

If I was going to become a fan of sports on TV, it would have to be something that has an interesting aspect like the fights at hockey games, or the falls with ice skating. Heck, even soccer became interesting last week in Egypt when all the fans stormed the field and proceeded to riot, killing over seventy people and injuring hundreds more while the riot police stood benignly by, watching the whole thing unfold.

What causes otherwise sane and law-abiding citizens to commit such heinous acts is completely, totally beyond me. The news reported that it was caused by “their team” losing the game. First, the team doesn’t belong to them. Just because that’s the team they want to win the game, doesn’t make it their team. It ain’t personal folks. In fact, its a game. Its just a game.

And the insanity doesn’t end with professional sports. I’ve seen behavior from parents at Little League games that is beyond appalling. What could possibly be so important about a six year old’s ball game that justifies parents getting into a fistfight. People have been seriously maimed and even killed during these altercations. And my friends wonder why I despise this sort of thing and refuse to become involved.

While doing a Psychiatric rotation during my nurse’s training I remember learning that there was always a large influx of battered women at the shelters on Tuesday mornings. They even had a name for it back then: “Monday Night Football Syndrome.” Seems the guys would get tanked up on beer and testosterone during the game, and release all the pent-up frustrations by beating the crap out of their wives and kids. Yes, what a noble pastime.

But I guess its all justified because there is a lot of money made by various people and organizations. The team owners, the concessions and of course the many millions paid to the players. These guys are often uneducated, with their only claim to fame a gift for athletics. The teachers who are molding and shaping the next generation of children, however, are making salaries barely above the poverty level, at least here in New Mexico.

Yep, today’s just another Sunday as far as I’m concerned. Gonna get some stuff done around the house, and then enjoy an evening with close friends.

Curtain-climbers, crumb-crunchers, rug-rats—people have all sorts of names to describe the kids in their lives. This time of year, they become germ-incubators.

Don’t get me wrong. I love kids; which is probably why I tend to be sick from Christmas to Easter. For every adult practicing fastidious personal hygiene, there is a small child picking his nose, sneezing into his hand (or into the face of his sister, friend, grocery store checker, school bus driver—fill in the blank), sharing her juice box, kissing the dog on the lips, peeing on the toilet seat (without lifting it), or leaving various pieces/splotches/splashes of food/drink around the house on the floor, table or counter-top in which to cultivate a wide variety of common germs.

I was exceptionally lucky, as a working mom when my daughter was small, to have mostly avoided the dreaded Daycare situation. For the most part, Lisa was watched by various friends and family members who folded her into their family unit, thus limiting the amount of germs to which she was exposed. The exception was a one month period of time just before Christmas, 1985, when for some reason I found myself without acceptable child care options, and decided to take her to the local church Daycare.

The very first day I arrived to drop her off, I was greeted by a little girl, probably somewhere in the one to two year old range, who was sporting a giant green bugger on her upper lip. I couldn’t to this day tell you a single other thing about this child, so focused was I on the apparent slimy offspring of the latest and greatest bug making its rounds of the greater Albuquerque Area that year. It took everything I could do not to clutch my small child to my chest and run for the door, never to return to germ-land.

Work, however, called. There were literally hundreds of people waiting in various cities around the U.S. counting on me to show up and transport them and their germ-infested offspring to other unsuspecting cities over the next four days. I paid for that one. Lisa never returned to that Daycare, as it took that entire month for her to get over whatever dreadful disease she’d likely picked up on the very first day.

That first year she was scrawny—she was born early, small and behind the power curve. That year a string of illnesses left her at the age of one weighing in at a mere fourteen pounds—just over two Tuckers, which is my latest unit of measurement.

From her second year on, however, her immune system founds its stride and she became one of those champion child versions of germ-incubator even the hardiest of adults fear. These kids pick up anything going around. During the two days the bug occupies the child, the kid experiences a slight sore throat, sneezing (which is what we can all agree is the perfect distribution mechanism for any bug), and perhaps a cough. They have many opportunities during those short two days they are feeling a little punk to spread the joy, I mean, germ. By the time you even realize they’re sick, they’re already over it, and have often not even missed a day of school.

You on the other hand, have caught it by then. Even armed with anti-bacterial soap at every sink, a bottle of bleach in one hand and a spray can of Lysol in the other, a nightly Purell bath and hands dried and cracked from endless washing, the bug somehow breaches all the barriers and you find yourself flat on your back and out of commission.

Your child is back to full appetite, requiring you to continue to drag out of bed to make meals. She’s scheduling playdates with other little germ-incubators, and the havoc they are all wreaking is making you exhausted just to watch. That little bug that your child, with her five year old immune system kicked in two days, takes you down, with your thirty-year-old immune system, for two weeks. Oh, the joys of parenthood.

As an adult, Lisa now has two of her own little germ-incubators. Tyler picks up the latest germ du jour at school, and brings it home to spread the wealth. He had it for a day, Lorelei had it for two—Lisa is now going strong into her second week. I was her side-kick last week, returning phone calls, scheduling appointments, etc., after she’d completely lost her voice. She’s been to the doctor twice, who told her to do all the home remedies she’s already been doing, to no avail.

Did I catch it? Of course! And I was nice enough to share it with Grant. Its a mean little bugger and apparently highly contagious.

Of course Tyler is already back at school, no doubt incubating the next dreaded disease. And the next time I see him, I’ll be opening my arms for one of those cherished Nana hugs, in spite of the dangers because, after all, they’re only six once.