Mrs. Teabody Buffers Selectively

Good Morning from Chez Teabody where the  last of the peony-infused air is a perfect complement to the green gold canopy of the surrounding trees. The world outside is one of dappled prettiness; the gardens are a bit refreshed by yesterday's shower. The day lies ahead, a blank canvas rife with possibility. You feel it, too, yes? Today you must say Goodbye to a May that worked hard to rival any April with her crazy extremes in temperatures. It's June. It's  (unofficially) summer. And summer means sometimes going outside one's comfort zone, one's hermetically sealed existence.

Do you regard the natural world as your enemy, Gentle Reader? Does the idea of having contact with a bee or a bird carry the same level of threat for you as  accidentally sitting down next to a bear in a darkened movie theatre?  While this modern world screams "CAUTION" at every corner, Mrs. Teabody finds it wise to bring a measure of common sense to day-to-day existence, to buffer the slings and arrows of a sometimes hostile  Mother Nature  selectively. Mrs. Teabody's mother's favorite phrase once the school year ended was always the same, "Go outside and play." Her second favorite phrase was "A little dirt won't kill ya." Children are notorious for dropping food. Baloney slides out of sandwiches,  ice cream cones topple, Sugar Daddys slide off the paper stick. Gravity carries the food onto the lino inside or onto the dirt, gravel or grass outside at which point Mother scoops it up, brushes away the big pieces and urges the eating of the fallen item to commence. Greedy children comply and that maxim about a little dirt carries over into fruit picked and eaten at the bush, patch or tree without washing. Who of Mrs. Teabody's generation hasn't gone belly down near a stream and sipped after a few choice nibbles at a perfectly formed mud pie? Mrs. Teabody's hands got a washing before sitting down to a meal and before bedtime. Otherwise, like Pigpen in  Charles Shultz's "Peanuts", Mrs. Teabody and her ilk -- as children -- walked around the planet for most of the summer in a haze of Mother Nature's  potent mixture of pollen, dust, bees and bugs.These days Mrs. Teabody insists on clean hands except for gardening, but she is not afraid of bugs and/or a little dirt and if you haven't eaten a strawberry right out of the straw without washing, well, shame on you. Or not. You suit yourself.

Similarly,  one must decide upon the appropriate amount of buffering to bring to the selection of a car. A few months back, twenty to be precise, Mrs. Teabody drove off the lot at Antrim Honda in a new white CRV, the definitive car for a woman of Mrs. Teabody's age and sensibilities. For twenty months Mrs. Teabody drove about in her huge luxurious bubble -- her posterior warmed almost to the point of medium rare, her ears and psyche salved with satellite radio from a perfect sound system, her only obligation in getting from point A to point B being steering. Steering is not driving, of course. Mrs. Teabody had no desire to shift gears as she had for years and years through a series of Volkswagen Beetles; she had no need any longer to take curves at a high rate of speed as from her days of driving a Triumph Spitfire; she did desire to have the reliable predictability of a series of Toyotas. After careful deliberation and much wringing of hands, Mrs. Teabody drove off the lot of Antrim Honda in a brand new Honda Fit pictured above. It turns out that this half  a ton lighter, four inches narrower and fourteen inches shorter machine is the perfect car for a woman of Mrs. Teabody's age and sensibilities. Mrs. Teabody misses her warm backside a little; she hates never knowing who's singing what on the potpourri of entertainment that pours out of McConnelsburg's 88.7 radio station, but oh-my-goodness, she does love DRIVING this car.  And getting 38+ miles to the gallon is a bonus.

The takeaway from all this is that one should buffer selectively. If bugs are the thing that bother you the most, take arms: bug repellent, gnat hats or in extremis, stay indoors through the buggy parts of the day. As for dirt, getting dirty is small enough sacrifice when the end result is a garden that smacks you over the head with color and texture and scent for this heady few months, so get a little dirty. It won't kill ya. As for driving instead of merely STEERING, well, if you got this far in your reading, you KNOW a metaphor when one rattles around in the bottom of a tin can. Don't you?