When my kids were little, I had a recurring dream: My neighbor’s children were standing in my driveway saying, “Let’s go to Mikey’s house. His mother makes great fudge.” In the dream, I’m looking out a bay window, beating on the glass, yelling, “No! No!”

It was a weird dream, since I’ve never made fudge, and neither of my sons are named Mikey. We also don’t have a bay window. But whenever I was in the kitchen back then, flipping through my recipe books for things that didn’t look too complicated to cook, I’d stare at the picture of fudge and think about making it. Then visions of Mikey and his buddies would return. They’d be eating fudge at my kitchen table. Their hands and faces would be covered in a drippy, chocolate glaze. I’d then close the recipe book, try to stop wheezing, and say, “Nah, let them go down the block to make the mess. Not in my house.”

Last week my 16-year-old son, Jeff, made fudge. He’s been messing around in my kitchen for a few years now. Although he has always said he wants to be an architect, I think his soul wants him to be a chef.

“I feel like cooking something,” is how he started. And then out came my recipe book. As he opened to the dog-eared fudge page that I daydreamed over, he asked, “Why don’t you ever make us fudge, Mom?”

Believing in always being truthful, my “because you and your brother are slobs” didn’t have an effect on him. He ignores me a lot.

“Well, I’m making fudge.”

And this is where the differences between this mother and that son begin. In my kitchen when I’m cooking, it’s neat and focused. Crack an egg. Discard the shells. Stir the batter. Place the spoon on a spoon rest. I’m organized. I’m neat. I clean up after myself.

Jeff, on the other hand, is like a sitcom that only lasts nine weeks. Crack the egg – drop the shells on the counter. Stir the batter. Lick the spoon. Stir the batter again with the same spoon. Chaos, confusion and food splatter.

He wasn’t always like this. As a little boy, his room was organized and clean. He was my little boy.

Now there are stockpiles of empty Dr. Pepper cans lining his windowsill.

He calls it Art.

As a little boy, I helped him keep his room in order. As a teen, I’m afraid something might crawl out from under his bed and inject its stinger into my eyeball filling me with last week’s TV dinner that’s molding under there.

Somewhere he rebelled. He figured out the right answers, “Don’t you know that by forcing me to have my room your way, you are stifling my creative energy which can lead to severe manic depression and perhaps the taking of illegal drugs?”

He knows all the right answers; he knows what gets to me.

With his room, I am as forgiving as I can muster up. It’s very hard for me. I know how neurotic I can get.

But with Jeff taking over my kitchen, he’s stepped over an imaginary line. The kitchen, no matter how much or how little I use it, IS mine. So his, “Well, I’m making fudge,” was upsetting.

I tried not showing my reaction. I tried to be supportive. But in my mind, I was seeing chocolate in between the rubber gasket pleats in the refrigerator and roaches marching in two-by-two to help clean up the mess.

I tried some reverse psychology. “Oh, good,” I said. “I love fudge. But you might have to miss Dragon Ball Z. Making fudge takes awhile.”

“No problemo, Mamacita!” my multilingual son said as he ran down the hall, returning with the small TV from the den.

I tried to distract myself as I watched him melting chocolate while he talked on the phone. I tried to pretend I was somewhere else as I heard him say, “Oops, two teaspoons, not two tablespoons.”

But a little while later, Jeff was standing in front of me, offering me a chocolate square. “Taste test time,” he said.

I bit in, and it was delicious.

“Well?” he asked.

“It’s great,” I said. “Now go clean my kitchen.”

“I did already!”

I looked into the kitchen, and it was cleaned the Jeffrey Way. The dishes were in the drain board. There was a can of Dr. Pepper on the counter. And there was a fudge stripe going right across the front of the refrigerator.

“Go finish,” I told him.

“No problemo, Mamacita!”

I’ve been having this nightmare lately: A group of women are standing outside my house saying, “Let’s go to Felice’s house. Her kid makes great fudge.” In the dream, I’m looking out a bay window, beating on the glass, yelling, “No! No!”

When asked, we tell people that we do Thanksgiving the way the Pilgrims did it, although I doubt Pilgrims used propane, disposable pans and barbecue grills. Still, when our children were young, we convinced them that since the Pilgrims cooked their turkey outdoors, that this was as close to a traditional Thanksgiving a family could get without dressing up as Pilgrims. We started cooking our bird on the grill after discovering the idea in a local newspaper. The article is folded into one of my recipe books, and every Thanksgiving our morning starts with a mad search for that twenty-plus-year-old newspaper clipping. Doing it the way the Pilgrims did it frees up my oven and allows me a less stressful holiday with more time with my family. There is none of that shuffling of pots and pans on my stove and in the oven or wondering if everything will be done on time. With the bird cooking slowly on the grill outside, I have control over my kitchen appliances, and the messy cooks stay out of my way.

One of the side effects of doing it the way the Pilgrims did it is that our neighborhood smells great. Our neighbors have come and gone over the years, but each year, someone new rings our doorbell and asks if the delicious smells are coming from our home. We invite them in and share our turkey trick. Most of my neighbors now do it the way the Pilgrims did it because of us. After Thanksgiving, with each new convert, we have received comments like, “We have never had such a delicious turkey! We’ll never go back to making it in the oven.”

Living in Arizona makes outdoor bird preparation easier. Over the years, we have had guests from other parts of the country taste our birds, and they have also become converts. When they are back in colder parts of the country, they don coats, hats and gloves and do it the way the Pilgrims did it – but with 21st century thermal insulation!

In my family, we have always shared in the Thanksgiving preparation. From the time my sons were small, everyone had a job. The biggest job, obviously, is getting the bird cooked. At least that’s what my husband thinks since the bird has become his job. The truth is that once the bird is on the grill, it becomes the easiest part. The hardest part of it is getting up early because the turkey cooks a bit more slowly on the grill than in the oven. According to my husband, without a perfect bird, everything else is gravy. (And he leaves the gravy to me.) That’s debatable, but since I don’t have to do the bird part, I let him live on Fantasy Island.

The actual preparation of the turkey is simple:

1. Buy the bird – the bigger the better.

2. Defrost the bird.

3. Make sure you have enough propane or charcoal or that you paid your utility bill.

4. On Thanksgiving morning, wake up your husband.

5. Watch your husband clean the bird.

6. Say, “Oh, darling, you are such a marvelous cook!”

7. Repeat #6 several times throughout the preparation.

8. Use a heavy disposable metal pan. Modern Pilgrims do not recycle on Thanksgiving.

9. Put a turkey lifter at the bottom of the pan.

10. If your turkey is large, find a strong assistant to help your husband get the bird on the grill.

11. Season the bird. (My husband goes to my seasoning cabinet and pretends he’s the Iron Chef as he chooses his seasonings. When Emeril was more popular, he did his “bam” here and “bam” there with his seasoning. A lot of his bamming here and there wound up on the floor – but I compensated by knowing my hands never touched the inside of the turkey.

12. Using the instruction booklet that came with your grill, if you can find it, use the settings suggested for preparing fowl or large roasts. If you are given an option, use the slower method because the turkey comes out better when it cooks longer and more slowly.

13. Make sure you have a back-up tank of propane or extra charcoal just in case you run out midway. That would be a Pilgrim Catastrophe.

14. Place the pan on the grill and close it.

15. Once every hour or so, send your husband outside to baste the bird with the juices that have dripped out of it. My husband sometimes adds a little orange juice mixed with canola oil. (I don’t ask questions. He’s the turkey pro.) I think he also adds wine. No one complains.

16. Watch the parade.

17. Watch a football game or two.

When is the bird done? It’s visual. When the skin is deep brown and your stomachs are growling, the bird is done. A 20-pound bird takes us about six to eight hours. With outdoor turkeys, bigger is better since you will most definitely want leftovers. Bring the turkey inside, and let it rest on the counter for a half-hour before cutting it. Shoo away all cats since some pretend to ignore the big bird on the counter – until everyone is busy watching a touchdown or eating appetizers.

Then be ready for an unforgettable Thanksgiving.

You will never go back to cooking a turkey in your oven again.

Would a Pilgrim lie?

In the days of disco, I could never figure out fashion. That doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I had outfits with metal studs – the bling before bling. I had all the clothes required to walk into a disco, club or skating rink looking for Mr. Right – in this case, Mr. Disco. I just flunked the world of polyester. I never felt comfortable wearing disco clothes. The issue I couldn’t quite decipher at the time was that I wasn’t meant to be with someone comfortable in that world. I was not Miss (or Ms.) Disco. I was still that pseudo-hippie-chick who felt best in torn jeans and tie-dyed shirts. My hair was meant to be long and carefree, not poofy, flipping up over my eyebrows, feathered, layered, crimped, multicolored or in need of the constant care of a professional. I was never comfortable or skilled with eye shadow and fake eyelashes. In fact, the only thing that was a proper fit for me in the days of disco was one particular pair of shoes. I had nothing that matched them at first – except jeans (which go with everything), and I had to buy clothes just to match the shoes so I would look right in a world that was a bad fit in the first place.

According to the salesman, these shoes were ultra-soft suede – the real stuff, not the pseudo stuff. They had patches of forest green, maroon, and gray suede. In these fabulous clunky, expensive-for-the-time shoes, because of very huge wedges beneath my heel and toes, I was almost five foot five! I had trouble walking in them at a normal pace, but I managed to keep my balance by keeping my steps short, most of the time. As for being able to dance, that didn’t matter. I was never able to master the hustle anyway.

In those days of being single, the world around me consisted of well-meaning people who wanted me to find Mr. Right and settle down. So these well-meaning people, mostly my mother, my aunt, and their friends, proceeded to provide me with an assortment of blind dates. I suppose they saw how uncomfortable the polyester, high-maintenance world was for me, and they decided to help me find a life away from Mr. Saturday Night Fever. Unfortunately, the extent of their matchmaking skills stopped at “Is he alive?” and “Is he single?” If he fit the above criteria, my number was given freely and without conscience about outcomes.

On one occasion, the blind date took me to the opera. Opera Man apparently was an opera aficionado and had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. My taste ran along the lines of The Who, The Guess Who, Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, and Country Joe and the Fish. So when Opera Man asked me if I liked opera, my brain went to The Who’s Tommy – a ROCK opera, and I told him I did. I just wanted to wear my new favorite outfit that I purchased to go with my forest green, maroon, and gray suede shoes. Unfortunately, for this occasion, I may have matched, but I was very under-dressed. I wore forest green pants, a fancier-than-usual blouse, and a maroon sweater to go with my forest green, maroon, and gray suede shoes. Opera Man was wearing a tuxedo, complete with cummerbund. Knowing I was under-dressed and trying not to be rude or unappreciative, I behaved admirably, I thought, and pretended to be moved by the opera while simultaneously making sure the suede on my shoes was dust free and the nap of the suede was all going in the same direction. At one point, Mr. Opera asked if I was enjoying the performance. I wasn’t paying one bit of attention to what was happening on stage because I had discovered a little speck of street tar on my forest green, maroon, and gray suede shoes, and I was trying to remove it. Opera Man never called to ask me on a second date.

Another blind date was with The Guy with the New Car. In the same outfit, which I still loved because everything matched my forest green, maroon, and gray suede shoes; a very short man arrived at my front door. I, who look up at everyone from my vertically-impaired (aka short) body, was looking down at him. I have no idea whether he and I had anything in common. The pre-date phone conversation consisted of a lot of talk on his part about the new car he just picked up. When he walked me out to his car, he didn’t open my door – which I suppose was okay – but when I closed the door, I did it the way I always close car doors; I closed it hard to make sure the door was closed. His response was a rather miffed, “Don’t Slam the Door.” Then I got a lecture about what happens if you do slam the door and an education about how this car’s doors were engineered so they would close tight without any extra help from me. Needless to say, the rest of the night is a blur, but I do remember slamming the car door every single time I closed it – in spite. The Guy with the New Car never called again.

There was another date where my forest green, maroon, and gray suede shoes played a pivotal role. It wasn’t a blind date. I knew Mr. College Professor when I was a young teenager, and when I ran into him years later as an adult, his interest in me was evident. As a young teenager, I had had an unrequited crush on him, about which I doubt he ever knew. So being asked out by Mr. College Professor was an incredible coup. He was about 15 years older than I was. The plan was that I would meet him in Manhattan at his office at the college where he taught, and we would go to dinner from there. I parked my car in a garage, and as I was crossing Second Avenue, the heel on my forest green, maroon, and gray suede shoes broke. I hobbled up to his office with shoe in hand, heel dangling. He tried to repair the shoes with Super Glue, a relatively new consumer product at the time. Just like that, my shoe was fixed. He was my hero. Someday I would tell my children about how daddy fixed my favorite shoe on our first date. Unfortunately, once the date started and we were across the table from each other, eating pasta in a very romantic Italian restaurant, it wasn’t a Lady and the Tramp moment. Instead, the age difference became uncomfortably apparent. I was the Beatles; he was Elvis Presley. I was Pete Townshend; he was Pete Seeger. I was jeans and a t-shirt; he was “Chantilly Lace.” No matter what we talked about, he didn’t connect with me, and I didn’t connect with him. It made a huge difference. Conversation just never started. There were long uncomfortable pauses. No matter how cool my shoes were and how huge a hero he was for repairing them…no second date.

Eventually, still owning the same shoes but no longer wearing them since wedged heels were out of style and the College Professor’s fix left them, at best, wobbly, I met my husband. With my husband, being more comfortable in old jeans and sneakers was part of what bonded us. I remember modeling the shoes for him once while wearing pajamas. He wasn’t terribly interested in the shoes. His reaction was something about not being able to go hiking in those kinds of shoes anyway. And it didn’t matter to him that I couldn’t do the hustle – with or without clunky shoes. He couldn’t either.

With our first home, my husband, Sam, and I could not figure out why it had been on the market as long as it had been. We fell in love with it immediately. It was a little red ranch house with an apple tree in the front yard on a cul-de-sac with over forty trees and a little babbling brook trickling along the west border of the property. It needed a little cleaning up, we thought, some cosmetics, but other than that, we believed it was a great starter house.

If you ask Sam, he will tell you that when he first saw the house, he was a bit skeptical, but he did not want to disappoint me. According to Sam’s rendition, I fell in love with the little red ranch house with an apple tree in the front yard on a cul-de-sac with over forty trees and a little babbling brook trickling along the west border of the property. It was MY dream house. I was the one who loved the little babbling brook. I was the one who wanted to watch our children shimmy up the apple tree. Sam will tell you that he had his doubts from the beginning and will never mention the tree house he dreamed of building with multiple floors and sliding glass doors for our yet-to-be-born children.

The truth was that our dream house turned out to be a very high maintenance home. The forty trees had forty trees full of leaves that we had to rake and bag, forty trees full of acorns, pinecones and other assorted goodies that we had to clean up, forty trees worth of bird droppings and wildlife habitats, and there was poison ivy climbing up every one of the forty trees and bushes on our property. The lovely cul-de-sac was also not on the maps used by the men driving the snowplows during snowstorms, so we were forced to dig ourselves out of our little dream home every time there was a snowstorm.

That was just the outside of the house.

Once we took occupancy, we realized our little red ranch house with an apple tree in the front yard on a cul-de-sac with over forty trees and a little babbling brook trickling along the west border of the property required a top-to-bottom overhaul on the inside. What did we know? It was our first house. We did not even know the right questions to ask. The owners, who had lived in the house for forty years and seemed to be a sweet old couple, never fixed problems. They just covered them up. And they were not very good cover-uppers. When there was a cigarette burn in the linoleum, they bought a throw rug. When there was a hole in a wall, they covered it with a picture. After we removed forty years worth of layered wallpaper and paint, we realized these owners covered outlets they did not use by stuffing them with newspaper and wallpapering over them without closing off any electrical circuits. The fact that a fire never occurred was a miracle.

However, we were first-time homeowners, and we were optimistic. In my rendition of our first home story, Sam had these problems all worked out. Sam was going to remodel the basement so we could buy a pool table and have a place for parties. Not that we were party people, but Sam wanted a place for parties in case we ever developed a need to entertain. Sam was also going to turn the attic into a second floor so our children would have their own bedrooms, and I could have an office. Finally, Sam was going to break out the living room and dining room walls to build a deck overlooking the pretty babbling brook on the west side of our property.

As the new co-owner of the little red ranch house with an apple tree in the front yard on a cul-de-sac with over forty trees and a little babbling brook trickling along the west border of the property, I liked his ideas.

The real truth occurred to us when Sam took our dog, Tiffany, for a middle-of-the-night walk during the first significant rainstorm, which occurred within hours of us moving in. Tiffany always had an uncanny way of needing to go for a walk at all hours of the night. This time, her dog-intuition was telling her an important message, which Sam realized the minute he stuck his foot out the front door into four feet of water.

The little babbling brook that trickled along the west side of our property that I had fallen in love with swelled during rainstorms. It swelled across our driveway all the way to the street and right up to our front door. It swelled to the point where it was a raging river, and our house stood in the middle of it. Our dream castle had a raging moat around it, and there was no drawbridge. Sam, my knight in shining armor, was as baffled as I was as he stood in the doorway not knowing what to do next.

After the first rainstorm, we quickly got to know our new neighbors who explained this phenomenon to us. Apparently, each neighbor had also fallen prey to similar home sellers. It had something to do with a high water table and the Army Corps of Engineers who moved the babbling brook fifteen years earlier in order to build our small community and a mall a mile away. The bottom line was scientific: water will always find its way back to its original course. In other words, parting the seas and moving a river are jobs not left to mere mortals. In other words, we were in deep, deep, deep water.

However, we had no way of knowing this. It was sunny on the day when we found our first dream home. It was sunny on the day the house inspector did his job. No matter how wet the basement got, the house always remained standing firm when the waters found their way back to the babbling brook.

The original owners felt that the flooding was only a minor inconvenience to them and did not feel any overwhelming desire to share the information with us. To quote them, “It only got that bad a few times a year.” They were not actually hiding anything by painting over the water line in the basement; they were simply giving us that fresh paint look. According to them, when we threatened to sue them for hiding this pertinent information, one of their sons was a circuit court judge.

As with many other first time homeowners, we learned many other lessons. We learned that sump pumps never work during a black out, and every time there was a rainstorm, we lost our electric power. We learned that French drains sound exotic and intriguing, but they are merely holes in the ground that overflow when the water table is higher than the exotic, intriguing French drains – and the wetness attracts insects. We learned that no matter how much you try to improve a home, it still might be sitting in the middle of the Colorado River during a rainstorm. We also learned that you cannot bail out a house.

Thus, we learned the most important lesson: when sitting in the middle of a raging river, stay in the boat until you see dry land, then jump to safety! That was our plan.

We actually got quite lucky even before we could contact a realtor to put our little red ranch house with an apple tree in the front yard on a cul-de-sac with over forty trees and a little babbling brook trickling along the west border of the property on the market.

As we were removing debris from our front lawn that was left by the previous rainstorm, a young developer approached us and asked if we wanted to sell our house for much more than we had paid for it. When we asked him if he wanted to walk inside, he shook his head and said he was going to knock it down to build condominiums. All the neighbors in the cul-de-sac got the same offer, and they all took the money and ran. We joined the run-a-thon and never looked back. Apparently, not one of the neighbors mentioned the words babbling brook, Army Corps of Engineers or water table during the transactions.

In fact, when the young developer told us there would be a financial bonus if we could be out in thirty days, we asked him if he would raise the bonus if we were out by the weekend.

With news of my husband’s pending transfer, our lives would change forever. We would be moving away from family and friends to a place where we would have to start all over. My husband and I were nervously excited about the move from New Jersey to Arizona, but our relatives and friends staged an all-out campaign to reverse our decision. It was verbal warfare staged deliberately in front of Jeff, our four-year-old son. In our family’s defense, they didn’t want us to move. However, their tactics were far from subtle. Jeff heard tales of a far-off land where mail was delivered by Pony Express, schools were one-room schoolhouses where work was done on slates, and children sat in the corner with a “Dunce” cap if they talked too much. According to my creative cousin, Arizona was where water came from wells, and out-houses were modern conveniences. Jeff, who was afraid of the pediatrician, heard of tribal medicine men who cured things using hunting knives. My cousin told Jeff that in order to have friends in Arizona, you had to become blood brothers. She also told Jeff that it was so hot in Arizona you could fry an egg on the top of your covered wagon. The worst thing she said, and the thing that brought Jeff to tears was, “You’ll never see snow again!” We tried to explain to Jeff that my cousin was making up these things so we wouldn’t move because she loved us, but we could tell Jeff was not sure what to believe.

Since the movers charged by the pound, we had to get rid of many of our memories. Our new Arizona home did not have a basement, and the attic was filled with insulation. It seemed inevitable that we would be joining the ranks of those who put their things in the driveway in hopes of selling it to people who knew treasures when they saw them.

My husband, Sam, a retailer, has worked in stores all his life, and before the First Giant Blowout Garage Sale his perception of buying and selling required a salesperson, a cash register, receipts, security cameras, advertised specials, newspaper inserts and bags with store logos on them. Sam never went to sleep the night before the First Giant Blowout Garage Sale. Unlike other garage sales, Sam wanted our driveway to look like a merchandising masterpiece. He used all the techniques he had learned from his college and professional experience. Items would be placed strategically so our customers would be psychologically coaxed into looking at them. Items would be appropriately priced for a quick sale. Sam was so involved in the process that at about two in the morning, he woke me up and said, “We have gaps. I need stuff to fill the gaps. What else can we sell?” While he talked, he was unplugging the TV in our bedroom. “We can always buy a new TV.”

In my bathrobe, in the middle of a cool spring New Jersey night, I trudged outside to see a driveway that resembled a department store. Items had signs like “Priceless collectible. Yours for only $5!” The $5 had been a $10 but it was crossed out to look like the price had been reduced. What seemed odd was that most of MY stuff was priced ridiculously low; Sam’s stuff, on the other hand, was priced insanely high. I made no comments. I would address the problem with my own red marker in the morning.

While walking through the garage to go back indoors, I noticed a pile. On top of the pile were two Flexible Flyer sleds we had each brought to our marriage. Mine was the cleaner, less-used one. Sam had informed me at the beginning of our lives together that his was better. His was ugly. The paint was almost gone. On our son Jeff’s first sleighing experience, he used Sam’s sled. Sam had convinced him “No real man would be caught on a girly dumb sled like Mom’s. Real men need cool sleds that go fast.” I wasn’t going to disagree. Mine still looked as pretty as the day it was purchased for me.

What Sam’s sled didn’t have was the memory of another use it had.

As a child, I lived in a small apartment. The doors to each apartment faced out into a grassy courtyard where neighbors sat on their stoops and had coffee in the evening. Neighbors were friends.

It was a Sunday. A blizzard had been predicted. The radio was on, and the broadcaster spoke of the snow in terms of how many feet we would get and whether schools would be closed the next day.

When the snow started and the streets started getting too slippery to drive, the dads in the neighborhood borrowed our sleds and headed off on foot to the only market in town. My dad pulled two sleds, mine and my brother’s. Mine was brand new and pretty, free of all paint chips and signs of use. My brother’s was a hand-me-down from my dad’s youngest brother. It was worn in and looked it. My brother liked it better that way. He said it was faster and much cooler than my new one.

The market was a little family-run store that normally wasn’t open on Sundays, but they were opening this Sunday so customers could stock up on essentials for the big storm. I remember my dad coming home with at least two dozen cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, crackers, hot cocoa, marshmallows, milk and several packages of Hydrox cookies and Mallomars.

During that storm, the winds changed, and the snow blew so hard and heavy that our neighbors’ doors were blocked. When the storm ended, we dug out our neighbors. That created a giant mountain of snow in the middle of our courtyard which was where we chose to use our sleds during that blizzard. That was where we played King of the Mountain.

I remember my skin being bright red and wet when we went back inside to change clothes and get warm. My fingers and toes tingled. We removed what seemed like endless layers of wet clothes. We did not have a washing machine or dryer in our apartment, so my mother hung gloves, scarves, hats, mufflers and sweaters over radiators and in most rooms around our small apartment. Space heaters were helping us warm up so we could go back outside to play in the snow again.

On the stove, we spied the hot tomato soup and cocoa my dad had pulled back from the market on our sleds. Dad and the sleds were the warmest memory I kept in my heart, and I wanted my son to have the same. It made me sad to think that by moving to the desert, our son would never know the sensations of a snowstorm or have memories such as these.

Lost in his own memories, Sam said, “We can’t get rid of these sleds.”

“No, we can’t,” I agreed.

I never went back to sleep that night. I went into the kitchen and made hot cocoa for both of us.

The garage sale was successful. We sold things we did not need. We sold things that in years since we have looked for and then suddenly realized, “We sold it at the First Giant Blowout Garage Sale.”

People wandered beyond the driveway and into the garage. A young boy and his father were standing in the garage, looking at the two sleds. “Daddy, ask him what they cost,” the little boy whispered loud enough for us to hear. We realized that we would have no need for sleds in Phoenix. So we sold them. My husband told the little boy that the pretty sled wasn’t as cool as the beat up sled. The little boy’s father stood there nodding his head in agreement, and said, “That one can be for your sister.”

This past fall, Jeff, now a young adult, left for college. In spite of our need for a warm climate, Jeff opted to move to Colorado. While packing his truck with all of the things he would need in a first apartment, Sam looked at me and said, “In Colorado, he could have used our sleds.”

There was no need to explain why I suddenly felt so sad.

To some, a garden must be lush and green with flowers and plants, a manicured lawn, bushes, hedges and trees. We had one of those when we lived in New Jersey. Our summer chores were focused on mowing, raking, trimming, cutting back, removing weeds and maintaining various projects we started. It was a labor of love, and it looked beautiful.

When we moved to Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, however, we were aware that maintaining a garden would be nearly impossible. How could we get color in a backyard when water was a precious commodity and daily temperatures would burn most plants? When we built our house, the landscapers we hired tried to recreate New Jersey in our backyard – and we tried to maintain it. We had a lawn that we mowed when it was 110 degrees in the shade. We filled in dried patches with seed where the sun burned through what had been there. We covered it with burlap to protect the seed. We planted things only to eventually realize that if something isn’t indigenous to this area, it will be difficult to keep it alive. We had a drip system to keep our bushes and plants healthy, but one by one, everything we planted died. We thought our neighbors had more luck than we did with their yards, until we saw them putting in new plants – just like the old ones.

Then, we had a revelation. The revelation was fifteen years in the making, but we decided since WE saw beauty in the desert, we should try to focus on THAT instead of trying to recreate what we used to know. With the teal blue sky adorned by wisps of clouds as a backdrop and burnished mountains sweeping the horizon, we decided to create a picture-postcard paradise in the desert right in our own backyard.

The concept is called xeriscaping – planting with little or no need for water. According to the State of Arizona Department of Water Resources, xeriscaping can take on many different looks depending upon the gardener’s taste. The idea is to decrease the harsh effects of the desert climate and increase energy efficiency by understanding the challenges and options available. We opted for the most minimalist approach. We wanted our yard to look natural – like the desert it used to be before man decided to cut it into developments. We wanted people to see our yard as a continuation of the desert arroyos adjacent to it.

We started by removing the lawn. It was not environmentally correct by any stretch of the imagination to use so much water. In its place, we decorated with sand, stones and boulders. We transplanted cacti that had outgrown pots and put them into the ground. We did a great deal of research and learned which plants required full (intense) sunlight and which required shade or defused sunlight. Everything required little or no watering. The concept was – if it needed more than a bucket a month, it didn’t fit into the plan. In fact, after planting the cacti, I became very aware of rain or lack of rain. I watered each plant (in the hot summer months) on the first of the month – unless it had rained. What I noticed over time was that I didn’t have to water anything if it belonged in the desert. Nature would provide. Over-watering tended to rot out the roots. To my surprise, everything produced by nature gave back presents. Cacti that just grew a little in pots grew huge in the ground. Some even flowered when they hadn’t in pots. What started as rocks and some little plants is now a cactus garden of enviable proportion. In addition, each of our plants attracts birds and our bird population increased. We now have hummingbirds, finches, cardinals, Gamble’s quail, Gila woodpeckers, Gilded Flickers and dozens of other bird species visiting. We even attract migrating birds just flying through our little corner of paradise.

Many cacti also have another positive trait. If a cactus becomes overgrown, you can carefully remove a piece of it and plant it elsewhere. These cuttings grow into brand new plants. In fact, if someone is visiting and comments on my cactus garden, I say, “Which is your favorite?” and I send them home with a cutting from it.

Like most Arizonans, we also have a swimming pool, which most of us who live in the desert find to be a necessity when it’s 115 degrees outside. Having xeriscaping helps me feel less guilty about the water a pool uses.

My favorite of all my plants is my cereus in the front of my house. When we planted it about twenty years ago, it was about eighteen inches high and only had one stalk. I have a photo of my sons standing next to it on the first day of school – both looking pretty miserable since vacation was over. In the photo, both boys are taller than the plant. Today, the plant is taller than my house and has about twenty arms. I watch this plant more than all the others. It often gets scattered buds on the various arms. As these become larger, they bloom. The last time the cereus flowered, we had 61 flowers – yes, I counted. It takes about ten days from start to finish for one bud to become a flower. The flower opens slowly at sunset to a five-inch white flower. I’ve read that bats like them, but I haven’t gone out to see them because I’m not a bat fan. In the morning, bees are drinking their last taste of cereus nectar, and by about 8 am when the sun is on them, they have completed their life cycle. Then the flowers wither and die – and from the root of the flower, a piece of cactus fruit forms – more food for those who live in the desert.

This morning, I went out to get the newspaper, and there was one flower opened on my cereus. As I stood and admired it, a new neighbor walked by with her dog. She asked me what type of plant it was, and I told her. She told me she planned to re-landscape her property with a more natural look than the previous owners had. I just went to her house and handed her a small cutting from my cereus. I told her the plant’s history, and together, we planted it in her front yard. When she asked me what she had to do to keep it alive, I told her the truth: “Leave it alone. Admire it. Appreciate the beauty of the desert.”

Ugh! Exercise!

Exercise was not something I did or ever thought I would do. I was embarrassed to go to an exercise club to workout with a trainer. I had always been a klutz, was never confident in knowing right from left, was on a small budget and just didn’t want to get into exercise with strangers. I knew I needed an exercise regimen to get into shape, but actually leaving the house to do this wasn’t for me. So I spent $6.99 each for two clearance rack videos, and I promised myself I would use them. They would not wind up on a shelf in the back of a closet like the various weight loss machines I had purchased from infomercials.

My first purchase was 15-Minute Workout for Dummies. I figured I had done no working out, working in, working up or working down in over 20 years so I qualified as the Ultimate Dummy. Plus, the cover on the video said, “4 Easy-to-Follow Workouts.” It sounded like a match made in Cellulite Heaven. I also saw Pilates Workout for Dummies. I had seen many infomercials for Pilates that claimed to give the person doing them a long lean body. I ignored the fact that I was barely five feet two. I ignored the reality that I would probably never be long or lean. If both videos were easy, I could alternate them. I could even do both tapes on the same day and take Sunday off for good behavior. The added bonus was that both videos had nice smiling women on their covers, and they seemed so fit! I could have tight buns and flat abs, too! And, if it made me look like the women on the covers, I’d have perfect hair and makeup, too.

On Day One, I waited for my family to leave the house. There was no way I was going to exercise in front of anyone. I got into loose shorts and a baggie top. Into the machine went 15-Minute Workouts for Dummies. I listened intently as the woman with the cute red hairstyle and abs of Kryptonite told me to take my time and do fewer good repetitions instead of more bad repetitions. Then the music started pumping. It was Disco all over again, and the nightmare began. Instead of inhaling and exhaling to the pulsating, rhythmic music, I was hyperventilating. Within three minutes, I was winded. I was tired. I could not keep up. I was reaching for my asthma inhaler. I was sweating in places I didn’t know the body could sweat. I was gasping for air. However, I kept my sense of humor. With my body still attempting to lunge and stretch with the super-fit Fitness Professional, being an adept multi-tasker, I picked up the phone and called my husband. (Heavy breathing) “Sam, if I’m dead when you get home, please have them wash off the sweat, un-frizz my hair, do a tummy-tuck, and squeeze me into my skinny jeans before you get rid of my body.” He laughed and told me how proud he was of me for trying something new.

The truth was that not being able to do this video proved two things: 1. I was still the klutz I was in the days of Disco, and 2. I was more out of shape than I had thought. Yet, I worked through all four 15-minute workouts that day. They were tough. I told myself I would never do them perfectly, but I would stay committed.

On Day Two, I did Pilates Workout for Dummies. It was a different type of exercise. At first, I liked it better because it was slower, but it was just as difficult, if not more so. The stretching was easy to do incorrectly. To do it right took focus and more effort than I had imagined. I stuck with that video until the end. I felt parts of my body I had forgotten I had. I hurt in places I did not want to remember. Then, I did not get up from the floor. I stayed on my back for about two hours. I earned a few hours of relaxation. If I was going to exercise, I was going to get rewards for doing it. I was even too tired to go into the kitchen. While stretched out on the floor, I realized I was exhausted, but I was NOT hungry.

That evening, I went to the closet where I hide things I don’t want to find, and I found a gag gift my husband had received for his 40th birthday: A Week with Raquel – 7 Day Wake Up and Shape-up Program. On Day Three of my exercise regime, I worked out with the still stunning Raquel Welch for fifteen minutes. It was not a strenuous exercise. I looked at Raquel and thought about Raquel’s body, wondering if it was like that because she always worked out or if she was just born with perfect genes. What Raquel did for me was warm me up for my Dummies exercises. I did not go all the way through the Dummies videos, but each day I increased the amount I could do.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I purchased two used copies of Richard Simmons’ videos from eBay. I had always made fun of Richard Simmons because of his outrageous behavior, but I knew he offered good aerobic exercises for overweight people. I knew he spoke from experience. His videos were actually fun. They were not difficult, although I did not look quite as talented as the people who were Sweatin’ to the Oldies. What I liked about his videos, besides the obvious upbeat music and easier format, was that the people who exercised with him were not all skin and bones. In addition, at the end of the video, he introduced each exerciser and below their names, the total weight they had lost was listed. It gave me hope that my meager 23-pound loss to that date could eventually be as significant as his dancers’ losses.

I figured a combination of these videos would be my exercise regime. I would work out and not get bored of any particular video. If I did not like one video, but it was good for me, I would not have to repeat it for several days.

There was a larger benefit, albeit small to many people. By exercising alone, I was building up my stamina to attempt new challenges. When my husband and I both got home from work early enough, I would be able to keep up with him when we went for a walk. This walk became an integral part of my exercise program, and was almost like going out on a date with my husband. We would walk and talk and be away from the phone, our kids and our daily duties for an hour. Walking with my husband was fun.

What was most important was that I finally admitted that I was one of those overweight people who needed more to guide me back to good health. I needed more than diet. I needed more than supportive friends and family. I needed exercise. My video collection is helping me with that.

Sam and I aren’t married yet. We will be married someday; we just aren’t married yet. We haven’t even discussed marriage. I’m happy. He’s happy. My dog is happy. His cats are happy. Life is good. And surprisingly, marriage isn’t on my mind.

But marriage IS on Sam’s mind and if there are hints, I am oblivious to them. We have planned a trip to Niagara Falls. I’m thinking of it as a romantic getaway; Sam sees it as a pre-honeymoon – and I miss all the signals. I have not developed the intuition that comes with time and stretch marks. Things don’t play themselves over and over in my mind until I have to wake Sam up in the middle of the night because something ticked me off six hours earlier. Sam has a plan, and I’m lost in dense fog as we head to our winter wonderland.

When we leave for our trip, there is snow piled on the side of roads and salt stains on our car. However, it never occurs to me that traveling NORTH to CANADA in WINTER is a little odd.

Sam is driving; I’m navigating.

As we approach Niagara Falls, it becomes very obvious to me. I can hear the pounding, rushing water pushing off cliffs, crashing into the rocks below. I can feel the vibrations. Imagine trying to talk while a subway screams past you in your living room. That’s Niagara Falls.

So when Sam pulls over and says I picked the wrong turn-off to Niagara Falls, I tell him I didn’t. With the sounds of Niagara Falls booming behind him, he screams, “YOU MADE ME MISS THE TURN!”

“LISTEN!” I scream – calmly.

“GIVE ME THE MAP,” he yells.

“You are such a jerk,” I say in a normal tone, knowing Sam can’t hear me or read my lips.

“You know, I was going to propose this week, but not after this,” he mumbles loud enough for me to hear.

“JUST DRIVE!” I suggest.

The rest is history. Five minutes later, we are driving past Niagara Falls. Sam says, “I knew we were almost here. Good thing I didn’t listen to your directions!” I ignore him. We gaze at the beauty of nature from our frosted windows.

Niagara Falls looks different in the winter than it does on postcards. Spectacular ice creations are formed on many precipices. There are also NO tourists in winter. It’s too cold for tourists. You have to be crazy to visit Niagara Falls in the winter.

At this point, there is also something very different.

Now, I know Sam’s ulterior motive for the trip. Sam, in his moronic rage, spilled the beans. I’m not sure if Sam remembers what he said in his side-of-the-road temper-tantrum, but I heard it clearly over Niagara’s deafening cacophony.

Before, I was traveling with my favorite guy. Now I’m with someone who wants to live with me for better or worse until death us do part. Before I was relaxed; now I’m wheezing.

We check into our motel. Everything looks acceptable. It looks clean and things match. Bedspread and curtains are of the same color family. I am afraid to look under the bed. I will not stretch out on the carpet to do my sit-ups, but walking across it – with shoes – doesn’t seem to be too disgusting.

As I get further into the room, I notice the painting over the bed of a hill and a field and, in the distance, Niagara Falls. Then, I notice something strange about our painting. There is some dirt in the field below the hill. I put on my glasses. It seems a previous vacationer drew little X-rated stick-figured characters doing things in positions that defy gravity. There are anatomically gifted male stick figures and well-endowed female stick figures frolicking on a hillside near Niagara Falls with their exaggerated teeny-tiny privates.

Discovering the stick figures puts us in much better moods. We’re laughing, and Sam’s my best friend again. We forget the side-of-the-road argument. I decide to take a hot bath to warm up before we have an early dinner.

Sam turns on the TV to check out Canadian broadcasts. Sam cannot be in a room without a TV on. It is still the first thing he does when he comes home from work. The TV runs constantly in our home, even when there is no one in the room. I walk through the house turning off the unwatched televisions, only to find them on again five minutes later with no one watching them.

I disinfectant the bathtub and fill it with scented bubble bath I brought with me. I get in to relax and warm up. My eyes are closed as I soak in the moment.

Then it happens.

“Honey?” says Sam, who is standing in the doorway. He is not in the bathroom and not in the bedroom but sort of halfway here and halfway there with his eyes on the TV.

“What, Sam?”

“Want to get married?”

This is said with the same expression as, “When was the last time you had the oil changed in the Honda?” He doesn’t move from the doorway and is not even looking at me.

“I’m in the tub, Sam!”

“Oh, okay,” he replies. He plops down on the bed to watch a rerun of Happy Days.

I sit in the tub contemplating what just happened and wonder if it was a hallucination.

A little while later, we are at the motel’s restaurant. Immediately, the level of cleanliness worries me. I mention this to Sam, and he says, “I know it isn’t your mother’s kitchen. Stop being such a clean freak. We’re on vacation.”

To be safe, I order a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke.”

Sam orders the all-you-can-eat baby back ribs.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“I haven’t eaten since New Jersey.”

Fact of significance: Sam finishes two and a half racks. My comment that the ribs looked green doesn’t impair his appetite.

Then the romantic side of Sam once again shifts into overdrive. Sam decides that we should go for a walk to see the falls. Sam nixes my idea of getting the car. We walk a few blocks. The closer we get, the louder, windier and colder it gets.

Sam mentions something about having an upset stomach. I tell him he ate too much.

I see the falls. It looks like Niagara Falls, only semi-frozen. Sam snaps some pictures of Niagara and me. I take some of Niagara and Sam. There is no one else there to help us preserve this moment with a photo of the two of us together. No one is crazy enough to visit Niagara Falls in this ridiculous cold.

I begin to worry about frostbite. All I want is to go back to the motel. My feet hurt. My toes hurt. My fingers hurt. My nostrils are frozen together. My ears hurt. I tell Sam I want to go back to the room. I am beyond cranky.

At this point, romantic Sam, yelling over Niagara’s rage, chooses to ask me once more, “Want to get married?”

I look at him. I am sure I heard him right this time!

I am freezing alive in subzero weather with my nostrils frozen shut, and I know I have to answer him. It hurts when the air goes down my windpipes. My eyes are tearing; icicles are forming on my cheeks.

I’m thinking that this is as romantic as Sam can muster: Niagara Falls in the background, the two of us together at a motel room with pornographic pencil drawings above the bed.

As I’m about to chatter out an answer, the color in Sam’s face turns bright green. He grabs his stomach, and then Sam vomits over the railing into the frozen ice formations below.

He vomits all the way back to the motel, all through the night, and never once asks me to marry him again.

The vacation comes to a screeching halt. I am driving us back to New Jersey with Sam stretched out on the back seat groaning about how awful his stomach feels, and that I should have stopped him from eating the ribs.

Before this trip I hadn’t given a single thought to getting married. Sam puts the thought in my head and then cruelly pulls it off life support. As I drive, I replay the scene of Sam calling me a clean freak. I replay him vomiting over the railing. I even embellish the story in my mind by having the vomit freeze midway down before hitting the rocks below. I aggravate myself about my almost-proposal. I mumble under my breath, while Sam writhes in self-inflicted pain. I have no pity. I speed joyfully over every speed bump. I deliberately take corners on two wheels.

Twenty-eight years later, I regularly remind Sam that I never actually said, “Yes!” to his proposals. Then I suggest going out for ribs.

I often say my grandmother was the original recycler. Even before the days of recycling bins for soda cans, my grandmother could find uses for things that others simply threw away. She was a recycler before people were attempting green living and discussing sustainability. She recycled before people were “Saving the Earth.” She was a recycler before it became fashionable to recycle. In the Fifties, when others were throwing things out and buying new and better, Grandma was finding new uses for old things. Perhaps it was that she lived through the Depression or because of her days in Europe when she had nothing but a desire for a better life, but Grandma could take someone’s garbage and turn it into a very useful item – at least it was to her. We made fun of her, and often her antics would embarrass us, but Grandma was smarter than all of us. She even insisted upon having an extra room in her apartment just to store things she was afraid to be without. She always bought extra rolls of toilet paper and cans of soup – “just in case.” In fact, my dad and uncles were able to stock up for all our families when she died, and they cleaned out her apartment. Nowadays, with warehouse-like stores such as Sam’s Club and Costco, her name often comes up. “Grandma would have loved this place.”

English not being her native language, it seemed so awkward (and entertaining to us) when this little woman would sift something we had just thrown out from the trashcan and say, “Waste not, want not!” It was almost as if she knew something the rest of us didn’t even think about – yet. Grandma would wash the item well and put it with the rest of her recyclable treasures. “It will have use – someday. You will see and laugh at yourself for making fun of your poor old Grandma!”

She had cabinets filled with washed out bottles and containers from the delicatessen. My father would tell her, “Throw it away, Ma! I’ll buy you containers from the store,” and she would respond with, “I might need it someday. Keep your money in your pocket for a rainy day.” I remember after she died, when we were cleaning out her cabinets and closets, my father saying, “Ma would kill me for this,” as he discarded another plastic vat or glass jar.

But Grandma was good. If a second life could exist for an item, she would find it. I remember the first time I brought a McDonald’s shake up to her apartment. “Don’t throw that plastic stick out!” she said as I was about to discard the straw and cup. I can use it to hold up my plants as they grow.” When Baggies came on the market, she was overjoyed with the concept of those twisty-ties. “I can wrap them around straws to keep my plants from falling over.” All of this was in her broken English. I remember going to her apartment one time, and her hair was twisted around straws and held in place with twisty ties. “Sure,” she said, “You spend your father’s money on fancy rollers. I don’t need them to make my hair pretty.” And she was beautiful with her tight ringlets.

Grandma did not need to buy new “gizmos and gadgets” as she called them. On her windowsill, she had an empty tissue box filled with birdseed. The birds did not care where the seeds were kept just as long as Grandma filled her homemade feeder. When we took her places, if we had drinks in disposable plastic cups, Grandma would collect all the cups in her oversized handbag and take them home, rinse them out and dry them. “It’s bad to waste,” she would say. I do not know if she ever drank from them, but I know she used them as plant starters – a little soil and a seed. She also used them to sort her threads, pins, needles, snaps, buttons and beads for the handiwork she did. “I can’t see small things,” she said, “This makes it easier on my old eyes.” The first time she saw me playing with Silly Putty, her reaction was, “When your Silly Pooooty gets old, save the egg. I want it for hooks and eyes.” When Leggs used egg-shaped containers for pantyhose, I was warned to save them for Grandma.

Old toothbrushes were never discarded. They were perfect for cleaning silverware, jewelry and those little spots Grandma kept spotless – the cracks and crevices her older fingers could not clean very well. I once saw Grandma standing on her kitchen stool. With a piece of my grandfather’s old undershirt tied around a toothbrush, Grandma was cleaning her chandelier.

Times are different now. There are so many more disposable items. However, I think a little of my grandmother rubbed off on me. Often, I will find myself standing at the trashcan holding an item I am about to throw out, thinking, “Hmmmm…maybe I can use this for SOMETHING!” Mostly, I have been using my grandmother as inspiration during these tougher economic times – trying to remember things she did to help us make ends meet – with her memory as my role model and inspiration.

When I was pregnant and was asked if I wanted a boy or girl, my answer was that I did not want a girl. I never said I wanted a boy. This left very few options.

There was a legitimate reason. During my teen years, I was rebellious, especially toward my parents. I did not want to give birth to one of ME! I had also taught in a middle school, and I knew I wasn’t an exception to the rule. Fretful parents arriving for conferences would say things like, “She is impossible. There is no living with her! Will she grow out of this? Do you know of any good boarding schools?” When a girl reaches a certain age, a girl changes. The thought of living with someone like me was worse than any fears I had of going through labor.

I was also never a girly-girl. I never liked dresses, frills or fancy things. I was happiest in jeans and a tee shirt. I preferred playing with trucks to dolls. I felt, knowing this, I would do a disservice to a daughter should I have one who wasn’t a tomboy. I would not even know how to dress her.

So, I had boys. Two of them.

My world was calm and peaceful with an occasional bruise or fracture for the first dozen years. With my sons, I had to learn to close my eyes when they were trying new biking or skating tricks. But there weren’t any meltdowns or explosions, at least not emotional ones.

Then, suddenly, just as with girls, the world changed, but with boys, it was different. Their first dozen years were pockets filled with creepy, crawly things, smelly clothes and handprints on the walls. Boys were stupid jokes, collections of things found in the street and a mishmash of disheveled parts. No matter how tomboyish I might have been when I was a child, I was not a boy. I still liked bubble baths and clean clothes. I may have preferred boy games and toys to girl games and toys, but underneath, there was a girly-girl trying to get out.

And then it happened. Just as girls change when hormones kick in, there is also a metamorphosis with boys. They start spending time in the bathroom experimenting with their hair. They try to shave, even though there isn’t one piece of facial hair on them. They request haircuts, sometimes odd and colorful. They ask to go shopping for clothes, even though the clothes they have fit and are not filled with holes or stains. They continue to act gawky and tell stupid jokes, but usually it’s for an audience, generally one containing a particular girl, who, oddly, is considerably taller than the boy.

I knew this when I taught, but I forgot it when it was time for me to raise my own children. Boys who were nonentities to me suddenly stuck out of the crowd because of a desire to dress differently or comb their hair differently. At school dances, packs of boys would arrive dressed neatly and with their hair perfectly combed. In the classroom, I saw more boys tip over in chairs because they were acting cocky by pushing themselves back on two legs of the chair with their hands folded behind their heads.

With my own sons, the transformation also happened during middle school. Suddenly I was buying hair gel, aftershave and cologne, setting regular appointments with the hairdresser and buying them clothes. When it was my turn to drive my sons to the movies or a party, the smell of cologne was overwhelming. The music got louder, the telephone and internet became busier and, slowly, my sons were becoming young men.

Last week, I drove my younger son to the orthodontist to get his braces taken off. While he was in the office and I was in the waiting room, twin girls exited the examination area, both with their mouths closed. When the pretty young twenty-something receptionist with the red hair said, “You were un-banded today! Let me see those smiles,” the girls shyly showed their perfect teeth. When my son came out, the receptionist did not have to ask. My son went over to the desk of this pretty receptionist, leaned in, propped his chin on his fist, and said, “See anything different?” Then he flashed the new perfect smile!

There is another plus to boys. There comes a time when they bring home girls. My older son has been bringing home the same girl for quite a while. I like her a lot. I like to talk to her and share things with her, but mostly, I like the man my son has become when he is with her. Someday, if I’m really lucky, I’ll have a daughter, but this one will arrive full-grown, attached to my son’s arm.