Masculine, feminine, and young

The preschoolers are learning about farm animal families. Horse families have stallions, mares, and colts, for example.

At the same time, my middle son has questions about his Bohemian ancestry. Our family is traced back to a person referred to as The Unknown Liska. "Liska," I told my son, means vixen. "Vixen" means foxy lady to males of a certain demographic. It took some effort to clarify that a female fox is called a vixen in the same way a female horse is called a mare. ... hen; ewe; cow; sow.

At least from 1970, "vixen" was slang for an attractive female that might do harm. Earlier and more traditional dictionary sources suggest quarrelsome, malicious, ill-tempered, and shrewish without the attractive connotation.

The Online Etymology Dictionary helped me understand that the "v" spelling used to be "f" until the late 1500s:
O.E. *fyxen (implied in adj. fyxan), fem. of fox (see fox, and cf. M.H.G. vühsinne, Ger. füchsin). Solitary English survival of the Germanic feminine suffix -en, -in (cf. O.E. gyden "goddess;" mynecen "nun," from munuc "monk;" wlyfen "she-wolf").

Thank heaven! Otherwise I would have to explain the Texas expression, "I'm fixin' to go get some sweet tea and chicken salad."

A male fox is sometimes called a dog-fox. Fox young are called pups, cubs, or kits by different sources. In Paul Galdone's version of Henny Penny, Foxy Loxy's family includes Mrs. Foxy Loxy and the little foxes in order to circumvent the entire vexing problem.





I'll have to read Patricia McKissacks wonderful book, Flossie & the Fox, to the children soon. F or V, M or F, "a fox be just a fox. That aine so scary."

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Hunkering reaches epidemic proportions

Gray is good. I love gray. No comments about old mares, please!



Our three-day MLK weekend of heavy winter rain pushed all gray-lovers close to the lemming edge. It seemed like horse blinders were attached to my face with that pink hairstyling adhesive tape we used for spit curls in the Sixties. Gray, an oppressive low-lying cloud resembling an overused kneaded eraser, hemming me in, narrowing my actions and thoughts. If you could watch Kramer feed Rusty the Beef-a-Reeno in the classic Seinfeld "Rye" episode on a twelve-inch black and white t.v. under a failing flourescent light fixture in an underground bomb shelter in North Dakota surrounded by a semester's worth of unwashed gym clothes, you would have an inkling of the grayness of our weekend.



"What are you doing?," we emailed each other.
"I'm hunkering down," we replied all.
"I'm hunkering down."

I never heard such a bunch of hunkering in all my born days. Must be a Texas thang!

"I'm hunkering down... I'm hibernating...I'm hiding under a quilt...I'm making roadkill chili in the crockpot."
"I'm hunkered down... Wearing my son's hooded Hoosier sweatshirt in the house."
Are you hunkered down? Have you ever been hunkered down?
"I'm plum hunkered out and going to bed now."

It has come to this, then. If Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar, we would just hunker down around it and maybe make soup.

Hunker probably derives from Scottish or Scandinavian words for haunches. You have to get down on your haunches to set your guitar on fire. It seems that LBJ popularized the expression "hunker down" during his presidency. Not all that surprising for a man with beagles named Him and Her. I've got some lentils, carrots, and potatoes. If I had a ham hock I could hunker down around the crockpot and make soup.

In my salad days I recall...

According to Dictionary.com salad days is a noun: A time of youthful inexperience, innocence, or indiscretion.

Salad days was coined by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra: "My salad days,/ When I was green in judgment, cold in blood."


Perhaps our latest current event could be marked on future middle school history timelines as The Salad Days. It's a scary business out there on the salad bar lines. Spinach has gone over to the Dark Side. Lettuce wants a share of the publicity.

Does this supermarket crisis have anything to do with Baby June, that five foot two bundle of dynamite in the Broadway musical "Gypsy"? Maybe it's a Jimi Hendrix posthumous advertising campaign using the music from "Foxy Lady" like those Led Zep and Jethro Tull car commercials!

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and then
Some new tricks
I'm very versatile ???




Maybe, just maybe, I need to teach my bifocals some new tricks so I can see that there's only one O! Just recall the cartons, not the cartoons. The terrorists haven't won.

Smashing my guitar

About a year ago, at the time of Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas, a Dallas Morning News critic named Thor Christensen wrote a piece on the history of rock star guitar smashing as ritual. It started off, "The rules of romance say if you love something, set it free. But the rules of rock tell you to smash it to smitereens."

When I first got the sofa, it was true love, but our relationship had lost the spring and shine of love about a decade ago due to trauma inflicted on it by the four men in my life. Sons are rough on a couch, and so is being hauled around to different apartments in a divorce. Too bad I didn't set it free in the property settlement and stick my ex with it. For several years now, the couch has been held up by three sturdy under-the-bed boxes from Target jampacked with National Geographics, debate trophies, Magic cards, and role-playing game books. The guys and their friends still found it comfortable enough to throw themselves onto it perfectly so that the three threadbare cushions were never properly pushed down and back under the upholstered back.

Gradually, the sofa became the symbol for my suppressed aesthetic needs, my overcrowded, cluttered condo, and my chronic low-grade financial frustrations. Basically, it came to represent the dark side of being a single mother. Don't get me wrong. My sons are fantastic young men, and I have loved every bit of being their mother. I love being single, too, and this condo has been a wonderful haven for rebuilding a family.

Over 66% of my sons has shared a fondness for Classic Rock with me. My youngest's most vivid tantrum was thrown in the Penneys store at Quail Creek Mall in north OKC while I was trying to purchase a red polo shirt for his dad's thirty-fifth birthday. He threw himself out of the stroller onto the floor, sobbing, kicking, and screaming, "I NEED my Classic Rock!!!!" And that was just last March.

No, not really. It was March, 1989, but it's gouged in my memory like the carving on a junior high school desk. His room, his incredibly messy, overflowing, sweaty, and oppressively stacked room (See Exhibit A) where he managed to write his scholarship applications, is decorated with Led Zep, Beatles, Who, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, and Doors posters.

Exhibit A

His brother took the poster of Jimi Hendrix burning his Stratocaster off to college, along with a great one of Stevie Ray Vaughan. The guys have shared John Mayall, Santana, and Steely Dan concerts with their old mom, along with the aforementioned Crossroads festival.

So perhaps it isn't entirely peculiar that after we received the long-awaited word of my youngest's college destination and the way to finance it, I smashed the davenport. I'm only sorry I wasn't able to set it on fire out in the parking lot. I hauled the cushions to the dumpster, then cut off all the padding and upholstery. I sawed the frame up enough to collapse it for ease of dragging across the parking lot to the dumpster. Climbed up on each side of the dumpster to tip open the double lids, and was well on my way to sliding the sofa carcass up and over, into the mosh pit when a passing jogger decided to help. This is my cathartic transition into empty-nesting------tidy, spacious, relaxing, soothing, white-walled, fingerprintless, tastefully decorated, eclectic-style empty-nesting (See Exhibit B)!

Exhibit B

You're never too old to rock and roll. On guitar-smashing, Eric Clapton told Christensen, "To me, it's show biz. I don't see much value to it, to be honest." I didn't see much value in keeping the sofa, either. Now, I've got to find my cd.

Ozone Alert

Poor air quality is predicted for the next few days. In fact, we are at level purple in the DFW area; dangerous for all people and poodles. When I go out to get the newspaper at 5:45 a.m., I expect to see a purple haze hovering over the parking lot. Purple haze. All in my brain. Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters! My lyrics are starting to braid. It's quite a double helix.

Today we did fabric mache on top of the papier mache camel. We're trying to get the camel texture with frayed and thread-bare terry towels and offensive double knits from the Bridge Club Ladies' Polyester Amnesty Program. If it turns out weird when we paint the camel, we'll give it a splendid saddle blanket. Fabric mache makes the project stronger, but I have never used it as the final layer before. This is the most inspiring papier mache book I've ever found:

The Simple Screamer: A Guide to the Art of Papier and Cloth Mache, by Dan Reeder.

We've had fun reading these stories about camels:

What's the Matter, Habibi?, by Betsy Lewin.

The Camel Who Took a Walk, by Jack Tworkov.

How the Camel Got His Hump, by Rudyard Kipling.

Then, of course, there's the seven hump Wump in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, by my hero, Dr. Seuss.

Voodoo-zoodoo! I'm getting an inspiration for an art project with camels brushing their teeth, [and it's about time!], like the kitchen kangaroo project.