Sweetgum WoHeLo

Growing up in Nebraska, I didn't learn about sweetgum trees. School teachers and Blue Bird leaders helped me learn about maples, pin oaks, locusts, pines, balsams, Bradford pears, crabapples, willows, forsithias, pussywillows, lilacs, and cedars.

Nature-walking again with the elementary class. The students have magnifying glasses this time. We find some sweetgum fruits. They look like medieval maces. Camp Fire Girl leaders back in Nebraska would have a heyday spray-painting these splendid natural specimens before gluing them onto styrofoam wreath forms. Forget the acorns and fluffy sycamore balls, the Quaker Oats and Baskin Robbins containers and Contac paper. This is true craft nirvana!

I'm grateful for the awareness of nature I gained in my Blue Bird and Camp Fire Girl years. It's good to know when to sit upon your own sit-upon, when to put on insect repellent, and when to put our head between our knees to keep from fainting. It's fun to remember our group leader's awe-inspiring talent for twisting apples apart during long hikes.

Just wishing I could remember all the different beads:

Brown--Outdoors
Red--Sports and Games
Red/white/blue--Citizenship
Yellow--
Green--
Blue--
Orange--

These last four were for Creative Arts, Science, Business, and Home.

Chemists have found that the seeds of the sweetgum fruit — also called “gumballs” — contain significant amounts of shikimic acid, the starting material used to produce the main antiviral agent in a much-heralded drug for fighting bird flu. The finding could help increase the global supply of the drug, which is now in short supply, they say. Their study will be presented March 29th in Atlanta at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society.


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Fretting and Stewing

It's amazing the things that keep us awake in the middle of the night. It's not surprising that we wake up in the night, trot to the potty, then worry about affordable health care for an hour or more. The U.S. health care and medical insurance system is a waking nightmare affecting all of us. Still, I don't worry about deductibles all that much. Lately I've been fretting about my lack of a winter coat for dress occasions.

My last dress winter coat was paid for by my parents when I was a sophomore in college. My gosh, I bought it at Hovland Swanson in Lincoln! It was a camel-colored wool wrap style, and hung in my coat closet for over twenty-five years. I liked it, but it was a rare winter when it actually fit. Some winters I weighed 105 lbs., looked anorexic, and the coat wrapped around me twice. Some years I was pregnant, and the wrap wouldn't go around my middle. Many winters I never had a single occasion for a dress coat. Then we moved to Texas, and it just wasn't wintery very often. Finally, alas, I hit a stage in life when it became obvious that the camel coat was never going to be big enough again. One year some natural disaster set off numerous coat donation drives, and the camel coat and I said farewell. It was sad, as we never really knew each other well, like employees in adjoining cubicles assigned to different projects.

So every recent autumn I have fretted about my lack of a dress winter coat. Menopause is a good thing, since I rarely need a coat anyway! Still, I know my parka looks really dorky on those January opening nights at the Dallas Opera.

Fretting, stewing, and insomnia don't have the hold on me they once did. I don't worry about the first day of school, or what to give people for Christmas. I gave up keeping track of the plastic chickens for the Fisher Price Farm. I got rid of my spouse so I wouldn't have to worry about what to wear to his office Christmas party. Okay, there were a few other issues involved in that transition, but we won't go into that now. There's no obsessing about what to wear to work anymore. When I started back to work a dozen years ago, I would be awake half the night, then unable to swallow breakfast, worrying about what to wear.

Funny thing. Next to nobody notices what you are wearing, as long as you are in the wide spectrum of "normal". Nobody cares what you do as long as you don't wipe boogers on their sleeve or puke on their shoes. Most people don't remember what you gave them for Christmas last year. Those plastic chickens will turn up eventually. In the meantime, EVERYBODY ELSE ON EARTH is obsessing about their own winter coat. We are all just galloping past each other at high speed, trying to lasso the right outfit!

So today when I went for some recreational zoned-out wandering at our aged, decrepit mall after a couple hours of spray-painting student sculptures, I was pleased to find a London Fog coat that fit without even looking for it! Better yet, it was seventy dollars off. Hat and gloves were on sale, too. I am good to go, and just not going to worry about that anymore! This coat may only fit one winter if I get suddenly skinny. It may hang in my closet for the next twenty-five years. I'm just not going to fret one way or the other.

Bad crafts and good fairies

Last week I received the gift of a milkweed plant from a butterfly gardener. Milkweeds are the host plant for monarch butterflies. They are the host plant for memories of Blue Bird day camp at Roberts Park, too.

Roberts Park had a tiny creek running through it, with reeds and milkweed plants along the banks under the spotty shade of big trees. As a Blue Bird, I learned to make a sit-upon out of newspapers, and a drum out of an oatmeal container. I learned to be very careful sitting on splintery picnic table benches wearing shorts, and that crying wouldn't get my mom to take me home.

When I "flew up" to become a Camp Fire Girl, I got to make far more advanced craft projects that all seemed to require gold spray paint. We glued dry macaroni onto a cigar box to make a sewing basket (and I liked the cigar smell!). When spray-painted gold, and loaded with straight pins and a measuring tape, we young ladies were ready to make quilt squares for orphans, which was a step up from making holiday napkin rings for nursing home residents out of tp tubes. I still have the same strawberry pincushion from 1965.

Camp Fire Girls attended day camp at the more remote, large, and wild Pioneers Park. I rode out there every summer day with the day camp director in the far, far back of her pale blue VW Beetle. We went early and were the very last to leave. Due to a terror of falling down a porta-potty, I was forced to stay dehydrated for ten hours per summer day.

We used a mosquito repellent that resembled a glue stick, and was called "6-12", or something like that. Coated with the smelly mosquito repellent, the bonfire smoke, itchy dried-on sweat, and the camomile lotion on yesterday's bites, avoiding the potties, and afraid to drink the instant Tang (in spite of the astronauts), I spent more days on splintery picnic benches and woven newspaper sit-upons. We hiked around the park collecting leaves to glue onto more oatmeal containers, and sandwiched other weeds between clear Contac paper to make bookmarks. We learned to coat the outside of an iron skillet with Joy Dishwashing Liquid to keep the skillet from turning black over the flames. We learned to not coat the inside of the skillet with Joy Dishwashing Liquid to avoid getting diarrhea. We learned to put nail polish on the tips of wooden matches and store them in metal Band-Aid containers in case of emergency. We learned to put our head between our knees if we felt faint, and to lean back if we had a nosebleed. We learned that "nature" was when you used four pieces of tree bark to make a picture frame. "Art" was making a lanyard out of plastic braid. I've got the beads and patches to prove it!

During the winter months we had weekly afterschool Camp Fire meetings in our basement. The high point of all meetings was having "treats", which were usually Hi-C and cookies or popcorn balls. Each December we made crafts like the classic Reader's Digest angel--again with the gold spray paint. Another biggie was making a pomander out of an orange and cloves. Do you know how many meetings it takes to cover the surface of an orange with cloves at one hour per week when you are ten years old??? I would rather go through induced childbirth than make another pomander in Camp Fire Girls!

The all-time greatest bad Camp Fire Girl craft project involved collecting milkweed pods, cattails, and other weeds in Roberts Park. Then next meeting, our amazing leaders brought LP 33 1/3 rpm record albums that had been baked in some fool's kitchen oven until the vinyl rippled and ruffled out from the spindle hole to the edge. Where the record label was, we glued on a halved styrofoam sphere. Into the half-sphere, we poked the stems of all the dried weeds and milkweed pods. Then the leaders spray-painted this aesthetic nightmare in gold. We were able to take these lovely creations home to use for Thanksgiving table centerpieces. You know, we gather together to spray-paint the milkweed...

I've done some dumb kitchen stunts in the pursuit of children's craft projects over the years, but I can't imagine the bravado and stupidity that would allow a young mother to bake LP's until they rippled. I set a microwave oven on fire trying to melt crayons for a wax resist project. I tinted the wallpaper around the kitchen exhaust fan a lovely blue by switching on the fan at the same time I sprinkled a package of dry RIT dye powder into a boiling pot of water.

If you would like to see a sweet video about fairies, look for "Kristen's Fairy House" at your local library or video rental store.