When the Jehovah's Witnesses Come Knocking

I'm not quite sure why the Jehovah's Witnesses always find me, but I suspect it may have started back in high school when my father sent two disciples up to my bedroom one Saturday morning for some weekend evangelizing. Fortunately, two of my friends had stayed overnight, so we got to wake up with the Witnesses standing above us, like a pair of visiting angels. My father stood jackknifed in the hallway, trying to cover up his fits of laughter while we were in our jammies, blissfully still in that post slumber teenage fog that rarely lifts before mid-afternoon, listening to their soft lyrical voices urging us to accept Jehovah.

I lost them for several years while moving up and down the east coast doing the six year college stint. And they never crossed the Atlantic for me when I was living abroad.  But once I settled down on the Cape, they came.

And they've never stopped knocking on my door.

We've developed this peculiar relationship over the years, and I figure the only way out of it is to move back to England or pop my clogs.


Grace and the Jehovah's come knocking every two to three weeks, and I've got so attuned to their visits,  I can sense one coming, just as I can predict a summer storm. I really do like Grace-I've given her that name because she knows my name and I'll be damned if I don't know hers. Her visits are usually in the middle of a deadline or when I'm in the middle of a Facebook creeping session or dredging chicken, my fingers clumped with flour.  She'll have one or two ladies with her, some old, some young, always in proper skirts and sensible shoes, clutching well worn bibles and copies of the Watchtower and Awake!

The latest lit drop

 I get the feeling my house serves as a training site for the entire region since Grace usually brings new faces every time she calls.

"Look how easy that was," Grace says.  "See, she looks forward to our visits. They all do. They're actually excited when we come."

I've met a lot of them over the years, but my favorite Witness is Connie, a 85 year old Brazilian who threw her arms around my son as he made his way across the front lawn after I slipped and told her he didn't believe in creationism.

"Do I look like I came from a monkey? she asked, cupping his face in her wrinkly hands.

I open the door, and stand on the threshold. I've never invited them in, though I have often thought Grace would probably love a cup of tea and a cookie.  It must be darn hard getting doors slammed in your faces all day long, but I resist the urge to feed them, and we exchange pleasantries on the step. She has one of those warm and welcoming faces, and if I wasn't so careful, I'd be tempted to confide in her. 

"Grace, I went 90 in a 65 mile zone."

"Grace, I took out "Fifty Shades of Grey" from the library."

"Grace, it's two weeks overdue."
 
She's a stunningly stylish lady, her glossy brown hair neatly resting in a loose bun. I'm tempted to pull the bobby pins out and let her hair tumble over her shoulders. She loves her bright lipstick and wears fashionable clothes, but then again, since I work from home in yoga pants and cardigans, anything besides elastic waist bands looks stylish. She loves cats and gardening, which is a good thing since I to steer our conversations to fluff topics and avoid religious ones since I skipped Sunday school classes and went to Leo's Bakery instead.

I get the feeling some one's watching me.

We'll chat for five or ten minutes and she always asks about my mother in law, Pam, who lives in England, my two cats, James and Nibs, and the kids. Pam knows Grace, too, and if Pam lived in the states, she'd be on the biweekly call list. Pam got me out of a call once and still remembers when I crouched behind a sofa and begged her to answer the door.

"Please Pam, I'll make you the best gin and tonic this side of the Mississippi. Just this once."


We'll talk about the weather, what I'm cooking for dinner, and my work schedule until we're both tired of dancing around the real reason- why she's planted on my doorstep.

Jehovah.

I'm not a particularly religious person. Living with a bunch of atheists will do that to you, but I know it's important to Grace, so I listen as she reads a few bible passages, praying she's picked out some short ones. Plus, I figure it must be nice to get through a few verses without having a string of expletives come from behind a closed door. While she's reading, she pauses and looks at me, hoping that I'll have a come to Jehovah moment.

She's been working on me for years and I'm sure she's tabulated her return on investment and it's not in her favor. I know she's under pressure to convert me.

"But Elder, I've almost got her."

"Okay, 1,545 visits and she's not budging."

"Rome wasn't built in a day."

Grace hands me a few issues of the Watchtower and Awake!

"They are some great articles in here," she says.

I promise to read them or at least skim through since she'll often ask how I liked the last issue and I still have those dreadful high school flashbacks when I hadn't read an assignment and couldn't answer the teacher's question.
 
I'm tempted to end our relationship, to tell Grace it's over, it's time for us to move on. That's it's just simply not working out. But it's not that simple.

I like Grace.

I can't say I look forward to her visits, and I confess I've dropped to the floor a few times when I saw Grace pull into my drive. As I lay on the rug, spreadeagled, holding my breath,  my eyes tightly closed, I feel a surge of remorse and self-loathing.

"I'm a 50 year old woman playing dead on the living room floor."

"How have I let the relationship go on for this long?"

"Can Grace sense that I'm home?"

"Is she peeking in the window?"

"Hmmm, I've just made a batch of snicker doodles, should I ask them in?"





















 

Our Garden of Horrors

I've always been the type of person who underestimates the amount of time it will take me to do anything, driving the husband and quite a few others in and out of the family batty.

The hubby says I sound like our local Chinese take out.

Everything always takes "five minutes," from painting my office to frantically rolling out fresh pasta as guests are pulling into the drive, to grabbing a quick cup of coffee at my favorite cafe.

So when I teamed up with my pal and her sister this past spring, and signed up for a community veggie garden that was just five minutes from my house, I should have known that the three mile journey would soon feel like a cross country trek through quicksand and our gardening reputations would be muddied, forever tarnished by "The Great Abandonment Scandal of 2012."

 "Darling," the husband said in his clipped British accent. "Are you crazy?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, I could ride my bike to the garden it's so damn close. Besides, Paula's office is a wink away," I said.

Like the hundreds of times before, he shook his head. "It's a stupid idea. You don't have time."

But we didn't see it that way. It would be our own little farming oasis. Our little patch of wonder.  We'd grow crops in artsy geometric patterns, we'd tie our tomatoes up with pretty grosgrain ribbon, we'd grow cilantro, jalapeños and tomatoes, so prolific our bounty, we'd be canning salsa for weeks, lining up the mason jars like trophies. Maybe we'd even win a prize at the county fair and get to wear a fancy satin sash round town. 

Our blooming plot of vibrant vegetables would be the envy of our new acquaintances,  a sturdy bunch of old Yankee farmers who eyed us with a peck of suspicion.

Maybe they'd present us with golden pitchforks and crowns.

"My, my," they'd cluck, "They should be in Martha Stewart's magazine."

"I can't believe what they've done with that patch of overgrown weeds."

"An epic transformation."

"How on earth do they do it?"

Where it all began.....

We met over at the community garden early one spring afternoon, the earth was just beginning to soften after the long grey winter,  and the welcoming fragrance of new growth floated in the air. Spreading stacks of seed catalogs over the rustic picnic table, we picked out dozens of heirloom tomato seeds from the evil sounding Black Krim to the happy go lucky Mr. Stripey, but soon realized even if we started the seeds that very day, we'd be lucky to harvest any tomatoes before Halloween.
 
We couldn't wait to get started. 

We'd throw apres work garden parties on the small common green, bringing yards of twinkling fairy lights, perhaps hanging lanterns, adorning the worn picnic table with vibrant colors,  artisan cheeses, grapes, baguettes, maybe even hire a guitarist.  I think we may have entertained making our own wine. It would become the place to congregate for evening cocktails and morning coffees. It would be an agricultural epicenter.

A farm to farm table success story. 

What we envisioned....

But less than a week later, as we lugged in our rakes and hoes to do a bit of pre planting weeding, we were met with a carpet of newly sprung weeds. These weren't your average nansy pansy whip them out with a quick tug kind of weeds-these were indestructible electric green matted monsters with roots reaching down to the earth's core.

I love weeding, really, finding it oddly therapeutic, spending hours squatting on my lawn, plucking out clumps of crabgrass. I've never met a weed I couldn't destroy. But these were hybrid warriors with roots of steel. They could star in their very own B horror flick, invading communities, covering homes, swing sets, bicycles, and unsuspecting suburbanites in hours. The weed covered folks would be frantically trying to find their pruning shears, but like most naughty gardeners, their rusted old shears would  be buried under a pile of clippings and they'd ultimately turn into human topiaries.

Would that be our fate?

Now, we gals are pretty strong. We do manly push-ups. And squat thrusts. In fact, in former lives, we probably settled the west, pulling the damn wagons ourselves.  Yet on that day, as we tried yanking out those weeds, sweat and dirt rolling down our backs and faces, we left defeated with only a tiny patch of our garden weeded, our knuckles bleeding, our enthusiasm dampened. Our fellow gardeners, with their wellies and sun hats on, resting on their hoes, had cleared what little weeds they had, barely breaking a sweat.

Had they known something all along?


They told us where to find a guy who'd till our plot for 20 bucks. He ploughed through our garden and once again we were planning our evening soirées, wondering how we'd hook up our fairy lights since there wasn't an outlet for miles. Could we haul in a generator? Hook them up to our car batteries?  Use candles instead?

What we thought it would look like....

We planted our heirlooms, our zucchini, kale, cukes, basil, cilantro, jalapeños, red peppers, green and yellow beans, and eggplant with every intention of daily weeding and watering. It looked so darn cute.

"Oh, we'll meet down here two or three times a week, bring our coffee and tend to our garden. It'll be a fabulous way to start the day."

"A great stress reducer."

"Gosh, we'll be down there all the time. It's so close."

"If it gets too crazy, we'll take turns."

We had it all figured out. We'd balance work, family commitments, and our own extensive gardens at home. By the middle of the growing season, we'd be knee deep in produce. We'd donate some to the food pantry, open up a farm stand. Be a farm to farm table success story.

But like most of our great ideas, (and we have many), there's just a problem called follow through.

We like to think of ourselves as industrious little percolators, pumping out one novel idea after another, feeding off each other's energy and excitement, propelled by our cerebral caffeine, but somewhere along the way we run out of steam.

Like the time we wanted to funk up the funeral industry with our fleece lined caskets. "Rest in Fleece" was our company name. We figured why would a manly man want to rest in a god awful slippery pink satin lined coffin?

Or like the time we envisioned 'active wakes." Instead of lying supine, the deceased could be waked doing their favorite activity, like fishing. Your uncle could be staged catching the biggest bass in his lifetime, dressed in waiters and reeling in that trophy sized fish, the sound of a babbling brook coming from an in house state of the art sound studio. Did your deceased love, love crossword puzzles? Your mother could be sitting by a roaring fire, (crackling noises courtesy of the world famous sound effects) finishing the New York Times Toughest Crossword Puzzles, Volume 8.

But then we figured we'd be putting our "Rest in Fleece" business out of business before it ever became a business because, well, it would be hard to fit these upright and decidedly stiff stiffs into our jazzy lined coffins. 

Plus we underestimate time. And we over schedule ourselves. And we move on.

Our daily watering never happened. The weeds choked our plants, squeezing the life out of our dear little plants, and started invading our fellow gardener's plots. It had turned into our garden of horrors. We'd sneak in at odd hours afraid to be seen as the women of the unkempt garden.

What it looked like.....

 The gardening police called.

"You ladies have to do something about that plot of yours. The weeds are spreading into other gardens. Have you just abandoned it?" Her voice, measured but dismissive, told me that our lease was up.

"But it was covered with those bad weeds before we even planted anything. I think we got a dud of a plot." I said.

I went down for the last time, on a blazingly hot day, determined to salvage our sullied reputations. I dragged my hoe, my pitchfork, and as soon as I walked down the garden path and spotted our little field of nightmares, I turned around.

Moments later, I was handing twenty bucks over to the till guy. 

No salsa trophies, no satin sash, no Mr. Stripey's or those evil Black Krims.

Not even a golden pitchfork or crown.

Just a few shots of our garden of horrors to remind us that sometimes five minutes is a very long time.

Moves Like Jagger

The 2011 party train pulled out of the Jones' station a few months ago, groaning under the weight of too many party platters, holiday dinners and impromptu cocktail hours.

Note the plural on cocktail hour.

There's a darn good reason why it's a singular noun.

And should stay that way.

I tend to host the big family holiday dinners because cooking for 20 doesn't torque my panties. I have a 'saddle up" policy during the holidays-the more elbows resting on my sagging table, the better. I work best under crushing boulders of stress, when  my stomach is uncharacteristically flat against the floor because King Kong is sitting on my shoulders pounding me with the hard cover of the Joy of Cooking.

I've got my beloved Swiffer in one hand, a food splattered cookbook in the other, with my cell sandwiched between my neck and hunched shoulder, chatting to Sissy, wondering if I have time to buzz up to Home Goods because I now must simply have the extra napkins  I fished out of my shopping cart and chucked into the accessory  department the other day. (That's called my psychological shop-up-packing my cart with eleven foot rugs, clearance casserole dishes, and serving platters taking them for a spin round the store and depositing said items on the opposite end of the store when I assess my goods and wallet and decide I really don't need an another white serving dish.)

I used to make out grocery lists for my dinner parties, but I'd either race out the door leaving the list on the counter, along with my wallet, or it would disappear in the big black hole at the bottom of my handbag.

this is why I never find anything in my handbag

Besides, I'd take one look at my messy shorthand writing and couldn't figure out if I had written litter or  lettuce. Instead, I loiter in the meat department, desperately trying to recall half grazed recipes, putting the neurons on turbocharge so I can pull up those  recipes whose ingredients I'd failed to commit to memory.

And this happens every time I have a dinner party, holiday or not.

Big Sissy makes out grocery lists.  She knows weeks ahead what's she cooking. There's no last minute running around for her: she dodged that muscular Cade Procrastination gene, the flame retardant DNA that makes us impervious to the pain of having a blowtorch aimed at our asses while still being able to resist those chores, deadlines, or decisions that we'd rather not do. 

But for me, half the fun is seeing how much I can cram into the day before my guests wander in.  And although the  husband says he wouldn't change a single thing about me (wink, wink), he starts squawking and fretting because if there's one trait that he'd rather not see expressed in the next generation of Joneses, its my "It'll only take five minutes," gorilla of a gene.  I've painted chairs hours before my guests lowered their bottoms onto the seats, touched up walls with minutes to spare, and had my mother in law tethered to an ancient sewing machine, zigzagging curtains seconds before the doorbell rang.

"Oh, darling, I just don't understand how you can do this," she tutted in her delightful British accent, her tiny feet tapping the pedal, sounding very much like an SOS call.

Between whirling around the house on my Swifter, heading to Home Goods, the grocery store, and repainting the kitchen, I don't eat. And I usually don't make it to the gym.

And that's not a good pairing. 

So, it's only natural that I unwind and enjoy the cocktail hour with my guests. But one hour turns into two and before I know it, my apron's off, I'm moving like Jagger and dinner is simmering on the stove, abandoned like the white serving dish and 8 by 11 rug in bath section at Home Goods.

See, my office morphs into a dancing den and I'll be damned if I'm cutting onions while my guests are cutting the rug so I throw down my santoku and slide across the kitchen floor into the real party room. Grooving with a bunch of middle aged mums, my teen aged son, who glides across the dance floor with a "unique" sense of rhythm,  is as almost as satisfying as sitting down to an overflowing plate of pasta and meatballs.

And while we're bopping on the creaky wood floors, the pan-generational music  bouncing off the walls, big Sissy always slips into the kitchen, making sure nothing has  gone up in flames. If there's one gal you want in charge during a suburban mosh pit maelstrom in the middle of a dinner party, it's Sissy, who stealthy weaves around the kitchen, ensuring we'll sit down to dinner before midnight.

I've decided that I'll set the oven timer for my next dinner party. Cocktail hour-one hour- max- and that includes boogie time. I just hope Sissy hears the timer.