Monday, November 15, 2010

(Don't) Look for us in the Nashville news

There are not enough minutes in the day to get everything done I need to do in the next couple of weeks (thus I am wasting even more time writing this post). With two jobs and craft fairs every weekend, I'm so scattered I don't know if I'm coming or going. It was like that a lot when I was teaching school and had small children at home. There was never time to relax or even slow down. With all that, I miss those times. I remember one summer day when my best friend "D" and I decided to load the kids in the van and drive to Nashville to the hippie grocery store. What a place that was! There were no Whole Foods or Trader Joe's in the area then, so we were fascinated with the bins of herbs and spices, with the dried beans in big barrels, with the organic and improved products we couldn't get at the Walmart. I had just gotten a bad haircut, and when I say bad, I mean really REALLY bad. Picture a combination mullet, lopsided hound dog, country music diva hairstyle and you've got it about right. But everything was copacetic because the kids were having fun and we were all glad to be going on an outing to the cool part of Nashville. We read the labels on the herb bins: peppermint for digestion, feverfew for headaches, and valerian for relaxation. Relaxation??? Now there was an herb we could use! So we bought a bit and headed for home. For some strange reason the ride home didn't go so well. The kids got really quiet. Our eyes started to itch. When we tried to talk, our voices came out raspy and rough. We soon figured out that the valerian was causing some kind of allergic reaction in all of us shut up in that van. Opening the windows didn't help. We had to do something. We had left the cool part of Nashville and were in an area with nothing but a rather seedy hotel nearby. We pulled into the parking lot and placed the small brown paper bag of crumbly dried plant material in the hotel's shrubbery among the cigarette butts and debris. We could only imagine how we looked: two desperate mamas (one with very strange hair) hotfooting it out of the parking lot looking over our shoulders the whole way.

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