No, I am not calling you an idiot, dear reader. I am the one providing the guidance material.
This idiot is not actually me… This is Doofy Fuddbugg. He is not overburdened with book-learning, but he can fix practically anything around the house or in the car. He can also tell a story pretty well that makes you laugh.
So, if I were to try to explain art day in an Idiot’s Guide aimed at explaining the essence of it to Doofy Fuddbugg, one idiot trying to educate another, I would explain that I am lazy on Saturdays. All I want to do is post pictures and not have to write a lot of heavily-thought-out words and ideas in the usual droning idiot’s essay of 500 words or more. So, I go through my WordPress picture file and find interesting pictures to post without having to draw or paint anything new.
I confess that I do not merely select pictures at random. I try to get pictures I haven’t used in a good while. This double portrait of Gretel Graymalkin, and what she looks like naked in the moonlight, hasn’t been used in a post since last year. And there is a bit of rhyme and reason to it too. Gretel is an idiot.
And this is a picture that any idiot can tell is a real picture of fairies in the park discussing the building of a new fairy circle after it finally started raining heavily again in Texas after almost a decade of drought. Of course, it has to be an idiot to tell that. Most people would recognize this as a pen-and-colored-pencil drawing photo-shopped over a photograph. Even the mushrooms are not real. I have it on good authority from fairy-kind that they are actually pixies in disguise.
And then there is this rare bird I drew a couple of years back. He is a surrealistic peacock who thought of auditioning for NBC before he learned they don’t still do those “Now in Living Color…” ads anymore. He’s surrealistic in that he could not possibly be real, unless he were really just a bowling pin and lady’s fan put together by a deranged painter with a mental disorder that makes him do decoratively dippy drawings on things you really shouldn’t be drawing upon in the middle of a bowling tournament.
And who can forget this idiot, an avatar of me as a purple Mickey in the style of the late great Don Martin of Mad Magazine fame? He’s the whole reason you get foolish lazy-Saturday posts like this at all, There has got to be a cure for that somewhere in the multiverse.
When Mickey and I heard that we were going to use the Magic Hat, Mickey got really excited. It was his turn to put on the ceremonial robe and bring out the hat.
“So, you do have the Magic Hat?” the girl Derfentwinkle asked while frowning.
“You know about that? What did Bluebottom tell you about it?”
“Nothing. But I read it in a letter he was writing. It’s a rare magic item that used to belong to Dezmodotto the Scroll and Sword Wizard. He believed you got hold of it when Dezmodotto died.”
“When Bluebottom killed him, you mean.”
“I didn’t know that part, but yes.”
“Everything that Derfie just said is true. Master Eli, however…” began Kack.
“Shut up, Kackenfurchtbar!” ordered Master Eli.
Meanwhile, Mickey had run to the vault-closet, used the key, and came back wearing the red apprentice robe and carrying the red, conical Magic Hat.
“I did it, Master! I brought the hat, and it didn’t turn me into a pigeon, and it didn’t suck out all my brainpower and make me stupid.”
“You mean it didn’t make you more stupid,” said Master Eli with a chuckle.
“Yes… um, I guess so.” Mickey put the hat on the floor between Master Eli and Derfentwinkle.
The hat itself was impressive. It was tall and stiff and red… covered with golden-yellow sigils and symbols.
Master Eli picked it up and immediately pulled another hat out of it. Another exact copy of the original hat.
“Here, Derf. Put this on your pointy head.”
“What is it going to do? Sort me into the proper house in the castle?”
“Ha! No! It’s good that you know about Slow Ones’ children’s literature, especially all the way from England. But this hat will judge whether you are evil or not. It may empty all the magic out of your head. Or it may turn you into a pigeon. I am interested to see.”
He put one of the two copies of the hat on Derfentwinkle’s head. Then he put the other on Mickey’s head.
“Why on my head?” Mickey squeaked.
“Because there may be secrets and spells that can alter the brain, and I don’t want them transferred into my head.”
Mickey looked at Derfentwinkle with horrified eyes.
“I know it is your turn to be the apprentice for this,” I told Mickey. “But if you are afraid, I will take the hat… if you need me to.”
“No, quiet boy. There won’t be anything that the mouse-boy won’t like. He’ll be okay.” She looked at me with what I hoped was a trustworthy look.
The hat on Derfentwinkle’s head began to hum… sort of. And at the same time Mickey’s eyes began to cross.
“MMMM! There it is! The sex magics!” crowed Mickey as his rat tail began to stiffen and twirl in small circles behind him.
Derfentwinkle appeared to be in pain. She dropped the plastic bottle containing the bottle imp, and held her stomach with both arms as if that’s where it hurt the most. I was concerned for her. Especially when her eyes dilated and she seemed to be staring through all of us with black orbs for eyes.
Then, mercifully, it all came to a stop.
“Aw, no! Where did the sex magics go? They were right here in my head. I knew how to do wonderful things.”
“Mickey, the hat absorbed all the evil spells. And then it recorded all the good ones. Just like it was meant to do,” said Master Eli.
“Oh, but I wanted to…”
“What? What did you want to do?”
“Um… I don’t know. The Magic Hat took it all out of my head again.”
“Just like it was meant to do. You were too young for any of that nonsense anyway.”
“Um, I am not feeling well,” said Derfentwinkle. “Can I lie down and sleep a little?”
She began to topple over, and I caught her up in both arms. She was really rather light to carry for a girl who was actually slightly taller than me.
“Well, the poor girl has just been through a wringer,” Master Eli said.
“Do I lay her down in the Harpy cage?” I asked, looking sadly at her unconscious face.”
“No, Bob. Take her to your bed… um, on second thought, take her to my bed. Let her sleep on the soft mattress there. But stay next to her. If she tries to escape or do something evil, you will need to kill her. But don’t get blood on my nice blankets.”
“How will she do evil in this state?” I asked.
“Oh, she won’t. Most likely you will just need to guard her and make her comfortable. If she has the wizard-skill I think she does, then she is going to be a very valuable property. So, be kind and take good care of her.
“Why does Bob get to do that good stuff, and not me?” complained Mickey.
“Because, although he’s not very bright. He’s smarter than you are, Mickey.” The stinky little wererat grumbled darkly as I carried the limp girl up the stair to the upper tower and gently placed her on master’s nice, soft bed.
It’s true. You have seen these multiple times before. They are some of my favorite drawings , paintings, and pictures.
You may not agree that these are my best work. That isn’t why I included them. These are pictures I simply like, and I could’ve added another hundred or so easily.
I thought that this silly poem needed to be re-posted because school is ending. The need for silliness is absolutely imperative. I also need to throw a few mooses… er… moosei… er… meese? How do you pluralize the word moose?
Life is as Hard as Bowling with a Moose (A Poem)
Life is like Moose Bowling, Because… In order to knock over all the pins, And win… You have to learn HOW TO THROW A MOOSE!
As the days count down, I have had to exercise my moose-throwing muscles more and more. Today I have five days left in my teaching career. So many precious kids I have to give up and never see again… So many teachers will tell you that every year the kids are getting worse and worse, and their attitudes are turning more sour, disrespectful, and violent. But those teachers don’t know the secret. You have to throw a moose or two at the problem. Real discipline is hard work. Harder than demanding that kids sit in rows and be silent… heads down and pens scratching away. You have to actually talk to kids and learn who they are… what they feel is important… what their problems are, and what they want you to do about them. You have to be honest, give them a hook or two to draw them into the whole learning thing. You have to actually care.
So, I do. I care. And I let them talk. It’s a moose that has to be tossed.
The comment was made this morning that you have to keep them working right up until the end of the year. Doing no formal lessons in class is actually a lot harder and more risky than continuing to plod through the textbook. But in five more days there are no more classes, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks… school’s out forever. I haven’t done any lessons since two weeks ago. Grades are in the gradebook. I have been showing kids my favorite movies. Especially movies from the eighties. (Truthfully, I have not been well enough to actually teach. My body aches and I can’t breathe very well) I have been talking to kids about those movies… what they think about them, and what they think about life in general. Kids are telling me they are worried about my poor health. They say they are interested in my books and my writing, even though they don’t actually read just for pleasure and will never buy what I write… or even look at this blog. They tell me about their troubles, their hopes and dreams, their most significant relationships, and they tell me that they will miss me next year. Five days… will I make it through without breaking into tears? No, I won’t. I may not even try. That’s one moose too heavy to throw.
But I have no regrets. I have touched more than two thousand five hundred lives (a pretty close estimate… I don’t have a good enough memory to actually count.) They have touched my life in return. No other thing I could have done with my life would ever mean as much. Doctors save lives, but teachers shape real people. So what does it all mean? I mean, really? It means I have thrown a lot of mooses… er… moosei… er… well, you know what I mean. And if my arms are growing weary, then it is for a very good reason.
This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.
This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.
But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.
You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.
She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.
And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.
But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)
And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.
She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.
Yes, I am old. I am not merely feeling old as school teachers do at the end of a school day, I am retired, I am on Medicare, and I am literally an old man. I am even old enough and mature enough to know what the word “literally” actually means and use it correctly in a sentence.
I don’t hear things as well as I used to. I don’t see as well as I once did. Being partially red and green colorblind, I don’t see colors as vividly as I used to. I have learned why old goobers like me let their glasses ride low over their nose. You can look over your glasses at the things around you that you don’t really want to see.
As an author of highly imaginative nonsense, I am really beginning to understand why “dirty old man” jokes are a thing. Writing a fairy story has led me to draw and write about a bunch of nude fairies. It isn’t really so much a sexual-perversion thing as it is a memory of and a longing for something that I no longer have in my life. It’s also the same sort of mental quirkiness as the “being a nudist” thing. I am not interested in the ugly pornographic sort of things, more the innocent, pristine, and long-gone things of youth.
And I see things that I know aren’t really there. Eyes staring at me from the bushes at night. Fairies flitting around the autumn leaves on bug wings. The back half of a ghost dog walking out the back door of the house even though the door isn’t open. I would doubt that I have ever seen a UFO if it weren’t for the fact that I was younger for the first two and my eldest son was with me and saw the third one too.
So, I admit that I have become a crazy old coot. But the best thing about being an old coot is the fact that I have earned it. I worked hard for a lifetime. I taught English competently for thirty-one years. I successfully raised three kids to adulthood. I have been a stable and useful part of society for more than forty years. So, I earned my crazy old cootishness. And I mean to enjoy it while I still have it.
I could tell when Master Eli handed me the bottle imp that used to be my friend Kack, that Kack was no longer trapped in a severed head. He was now a free-floating intelligent smoke trapped in a bottle made of some Slow-One’s special substance. It was not real magic because it did not make my magic-sense tingle. It was some kind of trick with Slow-One chemicals.
“So, Miss Derfentwinkle, tell us about yourself. And keep in mind your “Horrible Poop” friend will now tell us instantly if you are telling a lie.” Master Eli was looking at me with one eye opened wider than the other.
“Yeah, um… I am Derfentwinkle. I am the servant of an evil necromancer.”
“Do you like working for a necromancer?” Bob, the quiet boy, said.
“I hate it. I hate Kronomarke. He’s cruel, and he sent me on a suicide mission to get me killed intentionally.”
I swirled Kack around in his bottle.
“That is perfectly true… every word,” said Kack.
“Do you like me?” asked the weird mouse-boy.
“I find you mildly disgusting, but it was entertaining when Bob knocked you out.”
The quiet boy chuckled softly when I said that. I am not sure, but I think Master Eli did too.
“Would you be willing to betray your former master?” Master Eli asked.
“I would do so quickly and efficiently and deeply enjoy it.”
Master Eli grinned at me at that answer.
“So, is that true too, Kackenfurchtbar?” asked Bob.
“Derfie almost never tells a lie, but, sadly… this is not entirely honest.”
“What? You won’t really betray him?”
“She can’t. People she loves have their lives in his evil hands. But her heart is set against the necromancer, and she would betray him happily if she could.”
“Ah, I expected as much from old Bluebottom,” said Master Eli.
“So, are you going to kill me, then?” I asked, feeling doomed.
“Oh, no. Of course not. But I am not going to let you go either. You belong to me now. I expect I will hang onto you for a few years now.”
“As a sex slave?” asked the mouse-boy with an ugly smirk on his mouse-face.
“No. She’s free to fall in love with you, Mickey. But she’s also allowed to hate you if that’s how she really feels.”
The mouse-boy hung his stupid mouse head in shame at that reproach.
“Tell me, young lady, do know any of the spells used by your former master?”
“I don’t think I have any magical skills, and I know I don’t know any spells.”
“Not completely true,” blurted Kack.
I gave the bottle a violent shake. His floating eyeballs bounced off each other in the smoke.
“You probably know a lot more than you realize,” said Master Eli. “I heard those two crows claim to be your familiars. Not fairy-sized birds, but normal-sized crows. That takes a lot more real magic than you should be capable of.” He was grinning at me even more now.
“Does your evil master know about the crow familiars?” asked quiet Bob.
“I just found out myself. I don’t think he knows. But I’m sure Kack will tell you I’m lying about that too.”
“She is not lying about any of that,” Kack said. So, I gave him another violent shake.
“Wait a minute,” said the mouse-boy. “Why does she get a familiar when you, me, and Bob don’t, Master Eli?”
“Well, Mickey, a wizard is different than a sorcerer.”
I immediately thought a lecture was coming on. Something about wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers makes them want to explain every little detail in one long-winded speech.
“Wizards, you see, are different than we are. They get their magic from books and scrolls and head-knowledge. They have to study to get their magic working. They have evolved the ability to have so much head-knowledge that they eventually need another head to put it in. Thus, their minds invade and meld with an animal familiar, usually a fairy cat, fairy bird, spider, or some other fsairy-sized creature. I have never known a fairy wizard to have a full-sized animal familiar that was bigger than they were.”
I totally nailed it about the lecture thing. This guy was just as boring as old Kronomarke. Except he wore bright red smart-guy robes which were much more interesting than Kronomarke’s usual black robes.
“So, why don’t sorcerers have familiars?” genius mouse-boy just had to ask.
“Because our magic is different. Our magic is not head-knowledge. It is more from the gut. Intuition over intelligence. We pull magic out of our passions, our feelings, our natural insights…”
“Our sexual abilities?” mouse-boy attempted to add.
“No, Mickey. And that kind of thinking can get you killed around a necromancer. Derfentwinkle’s magic comes from a wizarding-way that draws on life and death. She may know Succubus spells that can drain the lifeforce out of you and leave you a withered husk.”
Dang! There went any chance to use that trick! Mouse-boy might not get it, but Bob just learned what to look out for, and he didn’t seem to miss anything that was said.
“So, you still haven’t said why we don’t have no familiars?”
“Ah, Mickey. Such a stupid child. At least you were bright enough to put on pants this morning.”
“He is right, though, Master. You still haven’t explained why…” Bob said.
“Ah, yes. Although you would be smarter with pants on, Bob, you are right. Sorcerers don’t need familiars. They draw spell energy directly from the ether, and don’t pass it through the brain of any creature. Not even their own brain. They apply it directly to the target. That’s why we use wands and staves and such rather than saying a lot of spell words and wiggling our fingers.”
“Oh. Thank you master. That was a very useful lesson,” Bob said with a cute little smile.
“So, Derfentwinkle, has your master shown you any spells, or made you read any books?” Master Eli asked me.
“No. Of course not. All the magic he gave me was inside Kack’s stupid little demon head.”
“She’s not telling you the whole truth. She has seen the Evil Master cast spells and heard the words he used to do them. And she read some of the books over the Evil Master’s shoulder.”
“Thank you, Kack. I wanted them to know that, but I couldn’t tell them because of one of Kronomarke’s spells.”
“She is telling the truth about that.”
Master Eli’s face split with a huge grin. “Very good, then. I think it is about time I employed the Magic Hat.”
I had no idea what that meant. But I knew it might be dreadful.
Who is really qualified to judge people? The Bible says only God makes that judgement. But who tells us what God’s judgement actually is? Especially if Nietzsche is right about God being dead?
Prudes
Not long ago I posted a short-short story about me wanting to see girls get naked while we were kite flying, and then, by verbal tricks backfiring, I ended up being the only one flying the kite while naked. I look back on that story now with laughter about my own personal foibles. But if I am completely honest, the church ladies with gray hair, wagging fingers, and tongues that are even waggier… Well, I am glad that the ones I knew as a boy are all now dead and can’t possibly read that story and shame me all over again.
And I know that I draw an awful lot of pictures and write an awful lot of stories that involve naked children. As a survivor of a traumatic sexual assault when I was ten (a thing that happened after the kite story was already in the past) there is a level of discomfort over recognizing that trend in myself. Not because I became a sexual predator of children. I clearly did not. I still am determined to prevent such things from happening in any way I can, though in retirement I no longer have access to children to talk with to find out about bad things that may be happening in their lives.
Derfentwinkle and Anneliese in my current work in progress, fairies both.
I write stories in which there are kid characters who are naked at times. Sometimes because of curiosity and developing sexuality, sometimes because of growing up in a nudist household, sometimes in their dreams, taking baths, and many other normal functions where clothing is optional. In The Baby Werewolf novel, I included a character who was trying to exploit a young nudist girl to make child pornography. He was the kind of predator I have always resolved to be against, and the book is intended to make readers aware of that kind of dangerous person and recognize where the opportunities to avoid such people lie.
And some of the nude young characters I create like the two fairy girls depicted in the illustration from The Necromancer’s Apprentice merely represent the liberating feeling you can get from embracing your own nude self, a thing my attacker deprived me of during childhood through trauma and fear.
I, as an adult human being, fully accept readers’ rights to be critical of my work and make prudish judgements about my writing. I don’t like that one critic of The Baby Werewolf who said things about my work being creepy for the wrong reasons (it is a horror story after all) and suggesting that maybe I as the author am bad and villainous instead of feeling that way about the villain of the story. It was fiction, not my personal life story. The villain character is not me.
But prudes being prudish and judgmental can do more damage than just hurting an author’s feelings.
I have had two students that I know of who were transexual.
One was raised a boy because he was born with a penis, but in grade school was discovered to have a womb and ovaries. I didn’t know such a condition existed until I saw an episode of Marcus Welby MD in the 70’s about a young boy who had to transition because he was actually a girl. The child in my class was from a poor Hispanic family that didn’t understand the problem and couldn’t really afford to deal with it. The prudes, judgemental as always, were not kind. This he/she hermaphrodite was forced to grow up as a flamboyantly gay male even though he was capable of physically changing into a woman who could conceive a child. I followed his development for as long as I was able. I did spend one long and awkward evening talking to him/her about his/her crush on me. I could’ve gotten the prude finger-wag over that strange conference too, if anybody had bothered to care about that poor child. I certainly wasn’t going to kiss him, and I had to send him home at the end of that discussion because of what he/she wanted from me. I suspect there were other men who took advantage of him/her. But I wasn’t close enough to help him in any real way. And I lost touch soon after he/she left my class. Based on that bizarre discussion we had, I have no confidence at all that the poor child is still alive. Nobody seemed to care about this child That is the most tragic of things teachers sometimes have to deal with.
The other trans student I had in class for a year was a girl as far as she was concerned. It was not a question open for debate. She was quiet and a good student. She only had a couple of friends, but they were good friends and stood by her. At the time she was in my middle school class, she already had breasts thanks to hormone therapy. By now she has probably transitioned by surgical means. Her life was a lot easier than the boy with ovaries. But prudes in Texas abound and provide a lot of sour fruit.
I personally find it offensive that anyone would deny either of these two people the use of whatever restroom was comfortable for them.
What gives the typical prude the right to pass judgement on anyone else’s behavior? Prudes can cause repression of natural behaviors for the benefit for no one but themselves. I find prudishness to be reprehensible. But the rub is… being judgemental about that makes me a prude too.
I try never to be judgemental. I would much rather accept everyone for who they are, or who they think they are, than rely on what I think they are. And I do listen when others judge me. I have changed things in my books and drawings because of observations my others. And I take everything seriously… especially comedy.
Catch a Falling Star 
Strawberry Fields
This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.
This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.
But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.
You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.
She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.
And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.
But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)
And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.
She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.
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