Mrs. Teabody Greets the Day

Blame the rain. Someone should. Blame John Mulaney's horse that's loose inside the hospital . I do. Blame  frustration for the world as we know it. Why would you not? But all of this blame-making wants clarification. That is what Mrs. Teabody does best. So pour yourself a cuppa of your favorite freshly-brewed loose leaf tea and get comfortable. We're in for a bumpy and extended ride. And do I actually have to tell you to turn off the tv? I thought as much. At least have the decency to push pause . Ta very much. Let's lead with this: I watch too much television.  Perhaps you do, too. With a few decades here and there when I BY CHOICE eschewed the companionship afforded by the  glowing tubes, I have been watching television for more than sixty years. SIXTY. Now that's a helluva lot of Mickey Mouse Club , American Bandstand , Twilight Zone ,  and Johnny Carson. That is decades of Days of our Lives ,   Search for Tomorrow and wondering for an entir...

" . . . Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense."  - Robert Frost "Something there is that doesn't love a wall. . ." One day as I sat on our porch, I heard a rumble and before I knew what was happening a large dump truck had driven onto the property adjacent to ours. Shortly after that, I heard the beepbeepbeep of a construction-style vehicle backing up and a few seconds later the truck tilted its bed and somewhere close to ten tons of "mixed materials" of asphalt and concrete cascaded toward our property. This was only the first of dozens of such trips. Someone somewhere was breaking up (or breaking down) a parking lot and what that "someone somewhere" no longer wanted was being hauled away to the woods, OUR woods, where nobody cares. It was not pretty.  During the succeeding days, more and more trucks arrived and the mound between us grew hig...

An acquaintance of long-standing, FactFree Frankenfurter visited my little tea emporium last week. He's a droll character and as smug and self-satisfied a man as one would ever hope to encounter.  FactFree Frankenfurter is that rarest of birds in this 21st century: the Know-It-ALL (ba-dump-bump). Now, never you mind that FactFree does not read a newspaper, has his television set tuned to one channel only and leaves it on 24/7 so it never cools down. He is a man long on opinions but a man short on facts. This is how our conversation went: "Why are you closing the store for a couple days this week?" FactFree asked. "Oh, I'm going to the New York gift show to look for new merchandise. You know I go twice a year." "You're going BACK up to THAT city? How can you stand to be around all them foreigners?" he asked. "Oh,  you might say that's part of the reason I do go.  ' Them foreigners ' as you call them are artists an...

I am wide awake looking at the moon and stars in the June sky through a window while I am lying in a comfortable bed inside a rental house in Penzance, Cornwall, England. I can count on one hand the times in my life I have been able to see a starry starry sky as sleep finds me. It's a doozy. I want to tell you about our first day here--Saturday-- before I lose the feeling.  Saturday morning started in tension: My three companions pictured above at Saint Michael's Mound had to make the 7:00 A.M. train from London  Paddington-- all four of us with all our luggage -- and we also had to meet up with two other friends inside huge Paddington Station because I had their tickets. All that went off without a hitch and the six of us managed to get on the train  in our assigned seats, our many pieces of luggage stowed on the main rack at the end of the car.  So far so good.  Great Western Rail have a scheme on weekends where you can upgrade to first c...

For some it is the ultimate comfort food. Familiar. Dependable. Uncomplicated. It is a staple found in most kitchen pantries. It is the sometimes rejected but always offered "side" in a restaurant meal. Think about your favorite meals from childhood and it played a role; think about a vegetable that is served daily in school cafeterias, at almost every fund-raising or celebratory banquet you have ever attended and even at most wedding receptions.  Think about the ultimate American fast food meal of which it is the noteworthy companion to the burger.  Yes, Gentle Reader, we are talking about the potato. Mr. Webster describes the potato as "a starchy plant tuber that is one of the most important food crops, cooked and eaten as a vegetable." For me as a child, it was almost the only vegetable I would eat. Beat the hell out of Brussels sprouts I can assure you . . . You can do almost anything cooking-wise to a white potato and it will still be delicious.  At...

It's past mid-April but here I sit on this "spring" morning in my flannel pajamas and wooly socks sipping on a hot cuppa Yorkshire Gold as if it's the dead of winter.  Any chance of sitting inside the secret garden for breakfast went straight out the window when I read 31 on the thermostat. Today's afternoon plan was to prune and treat roses because the forsythia is in full flower  but what does April have in mind?  Starting out at a balmy 31 degrees at 5:00 A.M., who's to say? April is a moody and unpredictable friend. One day she is sunny and generous, and the very next day she can  decide to drop an errant snowstorm into the path of one's best-laid plans as she did just a few days ago. Robert Frost knew all about April as he writes in Two Tramps in Mud Time : You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over t...

March marches on, doesn't it? Last week at this time Mother Nature was showing us here in Pennsylvania much of what she knows about creating havoc with wind. Needless to say, we were impressed. Perhaps distressed. Definitely stressed. I like calm. I like electricity. I was glad when the storm was over, but the storm and subsequent power outage reminded me of the forces of Nature of our planet and our place on it.  Of course many things about the world are outside our control; that being said, we still make deliberate choices about our behavior and our interaction with the world and the other humans whose paths we cross. Some of these choices are not wise. Face it: we often CREATE problems for ourselves. We overindulge in food; we push our bodies too hard or not hard enough; we abuse our organs with excesses of all kinds and we abuse our bones with our awkwardness,  our lack of care or  by pushing  our physical boundaries. And we do every bit as much da...