Grocery art

Spring break did not include tourist meccas or sandy beaches, but I hit two brand new grocery stores on my staycation. Neither had super-saturated color postcards for sale on a revolving metal rack.



What's the buzz? Tell me what's happening? This is the grand opening of the Frankford Road/Marsh Lane Aldi store at 10:30 Thursday.

Aldi has come to DFW. Comparison grocery shopping is a serious recreational sport here, and our area is often a test zone for marketing concepts.

Besides the first store openings of the German-owned Aldi chain, this week also marks the opening of the Park Lane Whole Foods store with a dedicated shopping cart escalator to the lower level parking garage.

The preschool rabbit was miffed that I'd given him raw asparagus last evening instead of fresh cilantro. He led me a merry extended chase eating up the minutes on the game clock. He was the victor, thwarting efforts to get him out from under the bed where I store dining table leafs, my mom's phone journals, and a big portfolio of watercolors. I was too frazzled to pack a sack lunch so it was an excuse to visit the new Whole Foods store. I figured I could brave the pouring rain to grab a salad bar box lunch.

Hurrying and Whole Foods don't go together. Unlike Aldi where the employees were caffeinated and ready to explain shopping cart deposits and the green implications of self-bagging, the wheat-germ gang at Whole Foods hadn't quite gotten the tongs to the salad bar at 8:45 a.m.

I'll go back when I'm not late for work. As I whizzed away from the check-out, I glimpsed an Art-o-mat machine. I need a technicolor postcard of that!

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Magnets on the move

Have appts. Need magnets. Sounds like a cheap classified ad.

My walking buddy moved her father out of his apartment into an "independent living facility with amenities." You would think the amenities would include fresh refrigerator magnets, but we are not living in utopia! This is not a nanny state. Sometimes we have to tough it out on our own.



Medicare doesn't cover refrigerator magnets even if yours are pitiful and don't stick anymore. My buddy's dad has doctor appointments to keep track of so he needs magnets.

Medicare doesn't cover my own dad's wheelchair now because he is in a skilled care facility instead of assisted living. This post cannot detail the convoluted thinking behind this ruling. I'm thinking that Dad's wheelchair has a lot of metal parts where we could use magnets to post advertisements at a price--Sort of like a slow-moving sandwich board to promote crocheted kleenex holders handmade by some lady named Ruby.

When I visit Dad it is depressing to see the family photos on the old fridge. My sister, brother, and I are gathered in these freeze frames from the weekend after our mom died in 2005. We look exhausted, stiff, and weepy stuck up with assorted magnets, frozen for the long haul at a very bad moment in time.

I'm opposed to grimy, old refrigerator magnets, and support No Refrigerator Left Behind. The other day I followed a pickup truck hauling a refrigerator. The fridge had been wrapped in many rounds of Saran Wrap to hold the door shut and all the magnets and photos in place like a sandwich-wrapped appliance mummy in situ. I tried to take a photo with my phone, but took a photo of myself instead!



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Limestone

Today I got sufficiently foolhardy to climb down the slope to the creek. I was following an orange butterfly, and hoping for a better view of the tiny fish enjoying the sun-warmed shallow water.

The butterfly was long gone when I got down there, but I got a good reminder that tree roots are holding this whole bank together. The limestone chips and erodes easily, creating concavities.



The macho mallards weren't interested in my insights into the precarious nature of the whole enterprise on their spring break afternoon.



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

The woodpecker of the day

Take my picture, please, please, please!


Today the red-bellied woodpecker wanted to appear on the cover of the supermarket checkout tabloid. It was jealous of yesterday's downy woodpecker. There's no other explanation for its cooperation with the papparazzi.



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Honoring a dead anole

Fifteen years ago when I desperately needed a connection to nature, I found small, color-changing anole lizards appearing on my patio, outside my workplace, and sunning on every rock. They were all telling me to Pay Attention, to start looking outside myself and my little drama. I probably wouldn't have noticed, except that they suddenly seemed to be everywhere. In a way, those anoles saved my life, or at least my sanity.



Now I am paying attention to the changes in an anole on my front sidewalk. He first appeared on my front stoop in mid-February, way too early for anoles to be out. When this lizard appeared again the first week of March, still stressed and brown. I hoped he was a sign of arriving spring. I put a warm towel on the sidewalk next to him and hoped he would feel better.

A few days later arriving home after work I found him again on the sidewalk, this time dead. Surely a cat, rat, or opossum would carry him off in the night.

It seemed too sad to scoop the lizard into my trash bag on the way to the dumpster. I could bury him, but maybe I should wait for insects to consume him and save his skeleton to show my students.

Each day for over a week I've expected the anole to disappear. Instead the skin shows more color everyday. No profound insights here about life, death, or returning to dust. I don't want to be morbid or gross. I'm just thanking the lizards for their insistent command to observe nature, and to notice by paying attention once again to a small reminder.




© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Princess socks and fairy shoes

Fairies will soon be dancing all along my creek judging from all the pink shoes and booties hanging from the branches of the redbuds. I suspect the tiny ruby-crowned kinglets will be their green-clad handsome partners. I'm remembering the many groups of children I've seen act out the story of the "Twelve Dancing Princesses".

For thirty-five years I've wondered what provoked my 300-level drawing teacher when he assigned our class to "change a shoe into a flower". The gruff, arrogant, heavy-smoking assistant prof did not seem likely to be inspired by a fairy tale or a spring walk along a creek. We believed he thought up the assignment as a particular torture for juniors who were starting to feel comfortable as art majors.

I'm still wondering, and that's more influence than I wanted to credit his teaching in the mid-Seventies. For today, I'll believe a redbud princess once danced before his eyes.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Accepting photography limitations

I've almost, but not quite, given up trying to photograph the birds I see on my one-block walks. Today's walk was a festival of woodpeckers, and this little downy woodpecker was a real show-off. It seemed jealous that I was slack-jaw agog over a pair of bright red-bellied woodpeckers higher up in the next tree.

The creek was a busy place. I backtracked several times savoring sightings of tiny ruby-crowned kinglets, slow-moving robins, flying ducks and a soaring hawk. I walked through several swarms of gnats and wondered about tiny gray birds flitting about much higher than the kinglets hop. Maybe they are gnatcatchers.

It's time to get out the bird book. I'm still pretty hopeless identifying birdsongs, but my slow walks have helped me notice the rhythm of rustles in the brambles that hint of kinglets.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder