In My Next Life

                                                                In My Next Life

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            “In my next life, I’m going to be a man. When I’ve punched the time clock, I’ll be off work, done for the day.  Go home, grab a brew, the remote, grunt, and wait for dinner to appear. I won’t cook. I won’t clean. I won’t do dishes. Mess, what mess? Do laundry? I’ll wear them again tomorrow. Fold clothes, why? Prepare lunch to take to work? Nope. I’ll buy something at the store. I’ll scratch my privacies in public and grin, think it’s normal. Think burping and passing gas is sexy. Then late at night, when the old lady has finished her work, I’ll get frisky. Yep. I’m coming back as a man.”

            My daughter, she made me laugh. I’m of the last unenlightened generation of women who grew up thinking all the above was normal. And I gleefully cheered from the cusp as the world of behaviors between men and women slowly changed.

            “Honey,” I reminded her, “when you met him was there anything in his raising that made you imagine life would be different. His mother was in charge of the kitchen. His father was in charge of the television. And then where did he go from home—into the Navy, not exactly a training ground to lead a guy to explore his feminine side. Get a grip, sweetheart. He was set in his ways when you married him.”

            “I know, Mom, but I thought I could train him to do some things differently.”

            “Yes, Daughter, we all thought that.” And why did we think we could change any man? The feminist movement? 

            No, it was literature. Fairy tales and fables, those childhood stories we drank with our mother’s milk. We grew up believing if we kissed a frog, he would turn into a prince. We had it backward. The truth is that we kiss the prince and he turns into a frog.

            If I fell into a swoon and slept for a hundred years while brambles enclosed my palace  bedroom, would a prince on a white stallion prance along, give me the kiss of life, put me  behind him on the horse and ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after in a magical kingdom. No. Unequivocally, no. What I’d get is old. And miss out on a lot of life.

            If i were lost in the forest, running from the wicked queen with the poison apple and found shelter in a wee little house with seven wee little men, would that elusive prince find me, rescue me, and restore me to our true queenly place in life. No, I’d find keep on being a drudge to seven little men, without pay.

            We women bought the romantic myth of being discovered when all seems lost, that a man would battle his way across desert and over treacherous mountain passes to claim his one true love. Women love this myth, the quiet, conforming “good” girl gets the hero while the “fast” woman, the temptress, stumbles and falls into a pit. It’s the same story as the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise never wins the race. It is pretty to think that way but it is a lie. The hare always wins.

            We grew up believing these stories, these lies. Who wrote them? Men. Hans Christian Anderson. The Brothers Grimm. Aesop. All these writings are types of romance novels. They were written for a niche market. Women.

            And in all fairness, I suppose it is the same for men. For sure no man wants to get stuck with the wicked witch. However, the only true childhood story, the one that makes sense, is Br’er Rabbit. “No, no, not the briar patch. Don’t throw me into the briar patch.” But of course, that is where the fox throws Br’er Rabbit, right into the thicket where he was born and bred. He knows every twist and turn through the brambles and scrambles to safety. But this clever Uncle Remus folk story, popularized by Joel Chandler Harris, was never held up as a model for women. We eventually learn to tell the difference between foxes, toads and princes.  

            No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. I know women who are handy with wrenches and men who love to take over the kitchen. In today’s world, and I applaud, there generally is a more equitable division of labor between partners. That might mean more “prince” days than “toad” days. That’s okay by me. I recognize my own “witch” days.

            But on those days, my girl, when you find you’re pulling the wagon in tandem with Mr. Macho, might as well finish the dishes, bathe the kids and tuck them in, grab a romance novel and lose yourself in the fairy tale.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

March 13, 2014

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Beware the Invasion of the Abominable Mutant Ninja Zucchini

 Beware the Invasion of the Abominable Mutant Ninja Zucchini  

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Ah, the joys of gardening. When the winds and snows of January beat against the northwest corner of my house, I sit snug at my dining table surrounded by an array of seed catalogs, each photo designed, arranged and enhanced to induce lust in my heart.

At first perusal I blithely mark anything and everything my heart desires. The second time through, I eliminate all but that which can be coaxed into growth in zone three. This leaves a fraction from which to choose, but still, I dream new gardens into becoming.

I pick, purchase, wait, plant, wait, nurture, wait, water, and wait some more. If the plant is a flower, and if it actually survives, you would think that I had given birth to each blossom. When the plant under my scrutiny is a vegetable, finally, O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!  At last the peas or cucumbers or tomatoes are ripe for harvest.

In this inhospitable year of late frosts, intemperate heat, dearth of water and gargantuan grasshoppers, I watch helplessly as my pitiful garden, gasping for another shot from the watering hose, shrivels and dries.  

While even the tree leaves hang wan and listless in the drought; one exception, oasis of green in the center of my desert garden, shoulder high, stands the dauntless zucchini.

It is beyond me why anybody in their right mind would plant a zucchini squash. But, in the insanity brought on by winter fever, I picked up a bedding plant at the first opportunity. I am not greedy. I contented myself with one plant in a four inch pot.

It grew. Now, every morning, feeling like Indiana Jones, armed with a machete in one hand and a .357 in the other, I wade through the jungle of umbrella leaves into the center of my zucchini vine, shove aside the humongous squash blossoms, and twist off those vegetables which grew overnight. I am faithful in this task because I like my zucchini small and tender. If I let one go for two days, it grows out of bounds.  Every day for the past month I have feasted. I have an entire cookbook dedicated to zucchini. I stuffed bagsful in my freezer for bread, cakes or a winter vegetable treat. The overflow I try to give away. Enough already. I am satiated. But my plant shows no sign of abatement.

These days, when my friends see me coming, my arms filled with zucchinis, they lock their doors. I have tried disguising them in bouquets of hollyhocks or day lilies. It doesn’t work. There is nothing for it but to leave the remainder to overwhelm. There must be something I can do, some possibility I have left unexplored.

Since none of my Montana friends will answer their phones when “Zuchinni Woman” calls, I dialed a friend from Washington. “What shall I do?” I asked.

“Hmmm. You could slice one in half lengthways, hollow it out and use it for snowshoes,” he replied.

“Brilliant,” I said. “Oh, my gosh, the larger ones could be made into wading pools for children.”

“Or stock watering tanks for horses and cattle,” he offered.

“If one hollowed them out in the same field where one needed the watering tank, the seed would lie dormant through the winter, sprout in the spring and grow a new tank for next year,” I said. By now I wriggled with excitement at the possibilities. “I could carve out canoes with which to float the river.”

“Or create yard art with your chainsaw,” added my friend.  “Grizzly bears and timber wolves. You could sell them at the Farmer’s Market in Havre.”

I closed my eyes and drifted into la-la land. I saw myself, like Johnny Appleseed, trekking the fertile valleys, sowing my prize giant zucchini seeds wherever I went, lauded in song and story, statues erected in town squares, my name to be engraved forever in history.

But wait. What if my dream back-fires? What if, just what if, this seed of mine is an escapee from the engineering labs at Monsanto, a reject, a mutant similar to the flesh-and-blood eating Audrey Jr. from the movie, “The Little Shop of Horrors”. Instead of praise, I would be reviled throughout the land. Men in bio-suits armed with napalm would dog my footsteps, futilely trying to eradicate the monsters I unwittingly set forth to multiply. Oh, the horror!

But wait again. How do I know? How can I tell? Do I have a precious prize? Or do I have a freak? What is that elephantine zucchini, so prolific in my garden? Until I know for sure, I must protect it, guard it. So if you see the razor wire fence with umbrella leaves poking above it, please keep out.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

August 16, 2012

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Harem, Scarem or My Life in the Seraglio

Harem, Scarem or My Life in the Seraglio

                My friends, Cheryl and her husband Dave, are touring Spain and Portugal this summer. They will stay the nights in monasteries, fortresses and castles. In one stronghold, many of the bedrooms were, once upon a time, occupied by the master’s harem. Cheryl said, “I certainly am not going to sleep in one of those rooms. I want no part of a harem.”

                Personally, give me the harem room. I’ve seen the movies. I could stand to be waited on hand and foot. I can see myself lounging around the marble pool draped in a diaphanous gown, posed against a backdrop of ferns, orchids and tropical flowers. I like the idea of brawny attendants waving ostrich feather fans to cool my brow; sparkling wine and hand-dipped chocolates at my side, not a care in the world.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for one minute believe this romantic image of the sultan’s harem as painted by Hollywood was the real thing. The harem was a place to keep women in seclusion. But it also served as a sanctuary, a refuge for the women of the household, whether wives, daughters, grandmothers or sisters.

We all remember the old cliché: a man may work from sun to sun but a woman’s work is never done. What intrigues me about a harem is the possibility for a division of labor, a way to split up and share that never ending drudgery.  Another cliché: Many hands make light work.

In my fantasy, we, the women of the harem, would work together to keep the household running smoothly. For example, tonight might be my night to cook dinner. Another member of my imaginary harem might do laundry, another take care of the children and yet another tend the garden. Perhaps tomorrow I get the garden. If I like to garden more than the others, I’ll take more of the garden days. She who enjoys the kitchen bakes the bread, bastes the roast, and burns, I mean, browns the gravy. We would seamlessly work out a schedule with everyone taking a turn, everyone getting a break, nobody stressed and overworked.

I can hear the protests. “That sounds like socialism. And your harem couldn’t be that perfect. What about jealousies? Back-biting?  Catfights? Slackers?”

             Hey, this is my fantasy and I’m creating it my way. But, alright, now that you brought it up, aren’t these difficulties part of non-harem, everyday life too? And don’t we learn to deal with them?

For me, the crowning glory of life in my make-believe harem, is that we women would have time for the arts. In the real world, arts have always been the prerogative of those with time and money. Virginia Woolf wrote that to pursue her art a woman needs a room of her own and a stipend. She wanted every woman to have the luxury of pursuing her talents, whether art or poetry or sculpture or finger painting or embroidering dish towels. For most of us who yearn for such creative moments time must be stolen from endless household duties plus the nine to five. We dream of the day when we can . . . but mostly, we don’t. We are too tired.

In the perfect world of my harem, we women would make sure that each of us got a chance to pursue our dreams, whatever they might be. I lean toward the arts. Perhaps you wish to study medicine. And she wants to repair tractors. In our harem, we would cheer one another on our way. We would provide for each other the extra oomph, the necessary push when the road ahead seems full of ruts.

On second thought, while I’m building my fantasy harem, why not include a marble pool where we can recline at ease, wafted by soothing breezes beneath a temperature controlled dome. Surround us with orchids. Bury us in blooms. Bring on the eunuchs to pamper us, cater to our every whim and indulge our every fancy. Tempt us with exotic foods, chilled wines and endless chocolates. Dreams are for free. Peel me a grape.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 26, 2012