Celebrating Independence in Idaho

4th of July weekend was one of the better weekends of my days. It was everything a 4th of July should be.....I felt very full of celebration, freedom, hope, God, love, blood, and the pursuit of happiness. Rexburg has become a place for my soul. Some places still catch my breath, some places still make me breathe easier than I have in weeks. Rexburg is like the trail for me. There are trees, rocks, trails, people that make the air sacred, the soil different from other soil. Places like the Bloody Basin and Cherry Creek and Sharon's backyard are the kind of places that possess people to take jars of sand and bags of rocks to carry their sacredness with them wherever they go. I have heartstrings there. I have broken pieces of myself scattered throughout, but they are tenderly broken, tenderly mended. Not like Logan, where parts of me have shattered and been bit....I do not think of Logan fondly. It is one of the only homes I've had that never became home to me. I met kindred spirits there, I found hope and light and reason there, but I do not care to visit the soil there. The Logan cemetery, maybe, but even that place's peace is too uneven.

These are the things I did that I loved about last weekend. The pictures are from last weekend and from the summer of 2005, when Sharon and her land embraced me home from Japan. The shish-kabob pictures are from mere days after I returned from Tokyo. It was one of the fondest reunions next to when I greeted my mom and my family at the airport and they drove me back home after being away for so long. I am so blessed by my family and friends. I am so blessed by what the different homes of my life have kept and remembered for me.

Things I Loved:

1. My car got egged the morning of the 4th. I drove from Layton to Rexburg with egg yolk running down the side of my car, egg shell stuck to dried egg whites on my side-view mirror. I embraced the rebellion of the boys/girls who attacked my haughty 2000 Hyundai Elantra. I feel like it was an initiation hazing for her. I'm going to call her Elaine. I think her spirit mingled with Charlie's in whatever pre-existence engine souls come from.
2. The Rexburg, Idaho, Independence Day Parade. They drove a tank down the streets and sprayed everyone in the vicinity with gallons of high-powered water. I loved how heated up and political that made Sharon. I love that the bike cop was Chompers from the College Ave days of 2001. Chompers, the security guard at the old Spori before it burned down...or was he the security guard at the Spori as it was being built? My years are jumbling together. Those were the Christopher Bailey days...my arch nemesis who sat on my chest and stuffed my mouth with Brazilian nuts and threatened me with swirlies every Sunday. I had arch nemeses in those days.
3. Sharon and her Writing Center toadies. The David O. McKay Writing Center kids...what a clan...what a cult. We are all blood brothers. We're like Shriners. They ought to wear a red fez to match their little black vests. I used to keep candy in those vest pockets and then forget about it. That would really peeve Jared off.
4. Lying on the grass. Independence and freedom is the ability to lie on the grass if you want to. Lie on the grass with a humongous 59 cent drink from Horkley's. Stare at the overcast Idaho sky and look at Chandler's bird books, breaking in your new sneakers with grass stains.
5. Madison County's Whoopee Days Rodeo. My vegan sister doesn't need to know I went or that I enjoyed it. I love love love that I went to a Rexburg rodeo with Jen Russell Parkins little brother. It was as close as I could get to Jen. It was pretty darn close too! Neither one of them are rodeo people and getting either one of them at a rodeo is a success! Jen, I miss you!! The rodeo was great, even when my allergies kicked in just before the bulls came out. I love making whoopee with Madison County.
6. The Whoopee Days fireworks. We didn't make it to Idaho Falls for any of the Melaleuca Extravaganzique but the Rexburg 'works were charming and perfect in their own way. One explosion.........another explosion.........another.....two at one time!........one explosion.........one.........another......ALL OF REST AT ONCE!!! BOOM! FLASH! KICK IN THE PANTS GLORY! More lying in the grass. Running in the grass, lying in the grass, switching back and forth.
7. I sidestepped out after the fireworks and saw Old Friend Troy. We watched Rosemary's Baby and ate pizza in one of Rexburg's crappier top floor apartments. I had been there five years earlier when it was girls' housing. I had studied Spanish on the balcony. The movie was excellent. I'm glad I wasn't pregnant when I saw it.
8. We finally chainsawed up the trees that fell in Sharon's yard. Take that Emily L. Pew! (She didn't think me + chainsaw = good idea)
9. Meeting up with Sharon's toadies in Rexburg's big fat real theater/bowling-alley and watching WALL-E--a surprisingly fantastic
and I-will-stand-behind-it film. I highly recommend it. I laughed, I cried, I watched it by myself on the front row next to two five-year-olds because it was too dark to find my new friends. I laughed at all the places the five-year-olds did and felt proud of that.
10. I love that two .9 mm pistols showed up at the pinochle table at the exact moment two ghostly white kittens appeared on the edge of Sharon's porch, walking towards where we sat talking into the smoke of the fire, roasting marshmallows.
11. I love that the cops were called, that Megan, Sharon, and I boxed up the kitties and drove them to Idaho Falls at a quarter to midnight and rescued the pink-eyed sickly white white kittens to the Humane Society drop-off, with cat food and styrofoam bowls of water. I love that two huge collared owner-less dogs ran around us while we secured the kittens in their metal quarters. I love that we stopped for slurpees on the way home.
12. I love talking to blood sisters.
13. I loved driving home....the road between Layton and Rexburg will always be a time for reflection and processing for me. It is a highly symbolic road, signifying so much travel, so much movement, but it always leads me right back to one of those two homes. I remember when I first traveled it at 18-years-old in August 2000. I remember thinking, "Wow, cinder blocks to make your bed go higher! How brilliant!" My roommate, Erin Hamp, and I watched the first episode of the second season of Survivor that night, when reality TV was so new and strange...it would never last, we all thought. It was both our first time for the show. We ended up watching the whole season in our apartment that semester, and we would occasionally vote people out of the apartment. Mostly me, because I left dishes all over the house. But I was the funny one, so they always let me back in. That first night in Rexburg I ate corn-on-the-cob and orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream and I cried myself to sleep. But even as I cried myself to sleep, I remember I still acknowledged that cinder blocks truly were a brilliant idea.

Wipeout! Game Show Completes My Soul

I am in love. Nothing has so gratifyingly scratched my persistent itch for slapstick humor since John Ritter tripped over his bellbottoms into lemon meringue pie held against Suzanne Somers' chest. I watched the rerun of the first episode with my grandma on Sunday, and my heart was transformed. I was skeptical at first (we had had a bad experience with American Gladiators the week before....two thumbs waaaaaaaay down), but by the time the second girl had to have her buttcrack digitally censored because her pants were falling down, and then she proceeded to bellyslide limply through the obstacle course's finale because she was close to passing out from fatigue, I laughed so hard I gave up grading papers and propped my feet upon the pile of them at the other end of the couch, leaned back, balanced a plate of sandwiches on my chest and focused on nothing else for the rest of the hour.

I miss the golden age of Double Dare after school. I miss Marc Summers and his obsessive-compulsive disorder at odds with the gaggles of green-gooed kids tackling him around the waist from the sheer bliss of their new bikes and Nike tennis shoes they won from successfully de-flagging The Giant Nose. I miss Legends of the Hidden Temple with Olmec and I even sort of miss that stupid Shop Til You Drop show my little sister used to make me watch with her. I miss obstacle courses.

Thank you Wipeout! for being my summer companion. If you have not yet experienced this television program, please watch the following clip in all its entirety. You will not be disappointed. You have to keep from getting cynical in the first couple of minutes, namely the girl who hates her ex. John & John, the commentators, are particularly punny in this first round, but things really get rolling with Margie Stubbs, the second contestant. She won me over to this show. She did, and the Big Balls did. I have yet to see someone try to cross the Big Balls that didn't make me laugh out loud in realtime. I love the Big Balls. I'll say it again. I love the Big Balls. I'm not ashamed to say that. The Big Balls are my favorite. And I even finally found John & John palatable when they quipped, after the particularly effeminate kah-rah-tay specialist bellyflops off part of the course, that he "must have received his rainbow belt from the Bob Fosse JouDou." It was a distasteful joke, but a suprisingly clever one. Or maybe that was just because it came after a long stream of puns.

Remarkably, by the time the show progresses to the end and you've seen people fall on their heads enough times for them to have lost vast amounts of freshman college curriculum brain cells, you are actually rooting for the last survivors on the final obstacle course. This one is held at night time, and there is a glorious spectacle of fire and water, and it's all very electric and post-apocolyptic. I want all my friends to start watching this show so that someday when I'm on it you can all cheer for me while I make an ass of myself reality-TV-style. Watch it. Tuesday nights or Sunday nights. ABC.

The Red Balloon, etc.

My kindergarten teacher played this movie for us just before summer vacation at West Kearns Elementary in June 1988. I was six years old. Today I taught Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Creative Writing to girls 13-17 years old. Some of them still suck their thumbs when they are at the group home reading David Sedaris and they think no one is looking. One of them has to carry a ratty, torn blanket covered with Disney princesses to symbolize her depression. Today I let them run around outside and write haiku underneath the volleyball net and on the grass in front of the horse pastures. She wrote hers from a swing, inspiring girls around her to write about the oscillating rhythm under a fish-eye blue sky, the blanket dragging in the dirt beneath her.

Half the girls announced to me that they hate school, hate pencils, hate readingwritingrythmatic, hate thinking and learning and doing, and ohbytheway, I have ADD/ADHD which pretty much makes me moot to anything you ever have planned, so don't take it personal, k? (They are also my best poets so far. Quirky, but good. They don't have enough vocabulary to hide behind fancy crap yet.)

The other half claim they have yet to be challenged in school. They've been reading Shakespeare since they were five and they are bored of teachers who grade merely on participation and completion of assignments. They are too brilliant to be normal and all of their wounds come from being too aware, too awake, too advanced. Their hands are constantly raised and I both love and fear them. They are who I was when I was 14. Lost, dazed and confused (sans marijuana), but oh-so-brilliant. I knew it all. Calculus=cake. AP English was a breeze. I yawned dramatically for teachers I felt were babying us. I could spell any word in the dictionary and hated spellcheck for stealing my thunder. I learned to read when I was four and got sent out of class in elementary school to read with the older kids. I figured I'd be an astronaut someday, or a writer.

And here I am now, dumber than ever, with a year of desert brainrot that has affected even the most simplistic grammatical equations. One girl circled a typo in my horrible getting-to-know-you sheet (something I promised myself I'd never make a class do), and I suddenly feared I'd become just like all the other English teachers I knew were faking it and probably preferred television over reading, too.

I am 26 years old. Just over a quarter of a century. My kindergarten teacher is likely in a nursing home and I don't even remember her name. But I remember her face, and I remember the Humpty Dumpty dot-to-dot we did on the first day. I lost it on the bus because I didn't have a backpack. So there you go. First and last day of kindergarten remembered.

Haunted Carnival: Straight from the Mission Journal (be kind to my immature, ethnocentric missionary self)

FIRST: I've been meaning to post this for some time. But I don't want it to reflect the full experience of my time in Japan. I'm a bit embarrassed of this entry and how we acted. At the same time, why hide how it really went down? My district lived far away from each other. We'd heard about the abandoned carnival and finally decided to meet there, as it was halfway between us all. Please be forgiving for how horrible we were and if anyone takes offense to this, the comment box is all yours. I'm sure I deserve any hand smacks and I'll try to make up for it by offering better missionary experiences in the future. But, without any further ado:

(oh, and click on pictures to enlarge. You knows the drill.)

May 25, 2005

I really will continue that entry later... it was a way good day with super fun lessons... Momoko Shimai came w/ us to Tsuda San's and Naito San's & then we ate at Bikkuri Donkey & went on 3-some splits where we visited Mori San who came home, avoided us, and left again, and Takamiya Shimai who showed us her origami & gave us really gross vegetable drinks & then I listened to the Legacy soundtrack in the car while we rode around in the members' car trying to find these places.


But TODAY......holy canoly. The abandoned haunted carnival at Kaya Onsen. Wild and crazy times, I give you that. We rode rusty spidery cobwebbed rides by having some of the elders push the cars/boats/things around.....it was really eerie & really fun. We went through the beat up & broken into haunted house and Moriyama and Fox jumped out at us in the room of mirrors.



Then we went into the eating part & past that through the pool locker rooms & out to the pool area that had maybe an inch of murky water left and fat tadpoles everywhere. It was there that we had DDM [district meeting] which included the Senso P.R.S. game by Morishige Shimai & training by yours truly (everyone had to write letters to themselves which they would receive in 5 years after I send them out in 2010. How cool is that going to be? (when I'm 28!!))





Anyway then we went & saw the game room & there were hundreds of boxes of statues and we were going to take some but then Fox chickened out so he and Moriyama went up to ask the guy watching TV if they could take them & the guy got upset but then sold them nicer ones for 500 yen a peice. So I gave my statue up (but accidentally took 3 golf balls).


Anyway, the craziest part of the trip (if you can believe it gets crazier) was when we went to over to a building....the temple part...and jumped over a wall and reached our hand through the broken glass door to unlock it and Elder Moriyama led us into thes room FILLED with golden Buddha statues as tall as me.....thousands....back to back in long lines with bigger Buddhas in between & one GIANT Buddha in the middle with colorful warriors on the sides. Everything was gold & all lit up and there were huge mirrors that made them seem even more huge and varied. We were way quiet and I think we were all a little scared. What did it all mean? There were SO many of them. It was really eerie.

Then we walked into another room where there were huge statues representing the various eras of Buddha's life, I think. But the scary part to this one was that the entire room was filled with sand and someone had set up little villages & palaces and SHEEP in the sand so there would be nothing but sand and then a little house off by itself, or some sheep. The whole ROOM was this way.

Tsuchiya Chourou got a little somber at the end when Moriyama took a picture of a Buddha statue kekkoing [rejecting] him offering an EIKAIWA chidashi [English class flyer] and Tsuchiya felt we were making a mockery of Japanese Gods and he would hate it if someone treated the things we hold sacred like we were doing to them. I agreed and immediately felt a different respect for the things we had seen and wondered at how I could have forgotten so quickly.....and then I started to feel guilty that I had been so afraid by what I had seen and had laughed and belittled the daibutsu holding a baby. But then I recalled the amusement park and just how strange and false and appearingly heartless the place was and fell into kind of a morose confusion about the whole day.


Then we went to Makudonarudo [McDonalds] and went home. By then it was evening and Sis. Morishige and I went to Priesthood Mtg. and talked about baptismal dates and inactives.

Oh and I met a Canadian girl today who will meet w/ us again but has no real interest in religions because she doesn't feel like we need a certain religion to be able to pray to and love God.

I agreed. But there's more to it.

It was a strange day..........

"Denim blue fading up to the sky.............."

I first thought to write this post a week ago, but I told myself: No, don't do it. It'll make you look self-centered and vain again. All you do is complain about your current states of mind and make broad ethereal grasps toward some juvenile philosophy/musing/stereotype/truism and end up sounding like a Molly Ringwald monologue from 1980s' John Hughes.

Well, I happen to like Molly Ringwald. And I have a ripped-up pink skirt that I bought for cheap at Target and it's lasted me three years and someone always comments that it reminds them of Sixteen Candles. And for the first time since I was three-years-old, I don't have any wearable blue jeans with holes in the knees.

I don't know how to analyze that. And I just watched Annie Hall and it's made me very neurotic and I don't have anyone to talk to right now because there is chaos in the desert and children hitchhiking back to their hometowns and all my friends have been called out to hike and to work, leaving me behind with my stupid third and final dentist appointment for my ninth and tenth final cavity fillings (which may or may not be necessary, according to friend Drew's latest theories of dental fraud).

So I just want to say that I've had to say goodbye to old friends this month. Friends I bought at Rexburg's Rags-n-Tans' Silver Jeans outlet all the way the hell back in the fall of 2000, my freshman year of college. Yeah, man. They're that old. They've been through so many first kisses and sand dune bonfires and Jackson Hole retreats.....and I remember when the holes were first getting formed I got kicked out of Brother Olsen's Spanish 320 course but I cried so he let me stay....... I had other pairs of holey jeans....one I had to retire when I religiously couldn't show my thighs any longer (luckily that retired my overall shorts, as well). Another pair I stopped wearing in 2006 because the hole in the crotch just couldn't be safety-pinned shut any longer. A more recent pair finally wore out on my backside....the fabric just got too thin and you can't sew patches onto fabric like that.

This was my last pair. The pair that Atsuko Sensei told me was a work of art every time I wore them to Japanese 3010. I used to wear tube socks with red stripes on the top because you could see them peeking up through one of the holes. It was my trademark. People shouldn't have trademarks. I don't believe in trademarks. I'm glad I don't have to have a trademark.

While I was making pottery with hippies in Boulder, Utah, a roommate in Arizona saw them in the garage. It was one of the only things in that garage that wasn't hers so I can understand her apparent desire to try them on. Seriously, the garage is filled with her things...she makes me believe that it's possible for people on Gilligan's Island to bring so much crap with them for a three-hour tour. She has thirty years worth of built up baggage out there that she only picks up when she has to move to a different apartment (approx. every three-to-six months). So I can see why she'd want to try my pants on. I can understand they were on her marked territory.

What I can't understand is why she'd choose to do lunges in them. My last pair of holey jeans. She tried to give me a high-water pair of Sevens jeans she bought at Savers, possibly clearance at TJ Maxx, as a replacement for my Rexburg 2000 Silvers with the flared bottoms. I didn't even try her jeans on. It's like trying to replace my dead dog with a trendy new chinchilla. Hells no. I went to my room and lay my pants on the bed with me and we cried together. We wept for all the times we'd had and all the times we'll never have. Then I threw on my swimming suit, put on my pants, and ran around several neighborhoods jumping into pools and rolling around in grass. I plan to make one of those denim picnic blankets out of all my pants because I can't bear to chuck them out.

I'm trying to decide if I should grow out of holey jeans or keep falling to my knees in prayer for a next batch. I'm sure I'm just being dramatic, but I'm a single woman in my later-20s, in a limbo period between commitments, and I don't have a pet or a boyfriend. I'm afraid I need an outlet and right now venting about my lost jeans feels good. "And though you want them to last forever, you know they never will....and the patches make the goodbye harder still." Goodbye, my pants. It's been real--true and blue.

I snuck a camera onto the trail.......

........and these are some pictures that I took. I was only out there from a Friday evening to a Monday afternoon, and I had to hide my camera, so these are some pictures I took while I was making radio check-ins, et cetera--anytime I was wandering around by myself. These may be interesting or they may not be. Either way, here they are.

Due to some dental-emergency-type errands I have to run repeatedly in the next two weeks, I found out I don't have any more full weeks on the trail left. Just a couple more Friday-to-Mondays. It's bittersweet, but we're on fire restrictions now anyway....fires have been replaced by stoves. We still have to bust a coal with saguaro and seep willow and blow the coal into flame with tinder, but once the stove is lit, the tinder bundle is stamped out. It's actually a positive thing, in some ways. Everyone learns to bust coals quickly and efficiently and you never run out of tinder since you can re-use the same bundle a half-dozen times. I busted two coals a day the last week I was out. Anyway, blah blah blah. Pictures of the desert, for anyone with the time to glimpse them:

Here's a picture of my pack. The straps are made out of my army-issued sleeping burrito--what I put my sleeping bag in at night for added warmth. Mine is pretty ripped up.

People claim you can use hooked needles from this cactus to go fishing.

Along with stoves, gaiters are also back for the summer. They supposedly protect against rattlesnake bites, but considering a high majority of bites occur on the arms, face, and hands of men between the ages of 15 and 35 (I'm making half of that up, I think) I'm not sure why our ankles are at such a huge risk. But I like mine because they make me look like I'm wearing bellbottoms and I can run through catclaw mimosa with them.

Much of the wildflowers are clamming up for the summer, but they are being replaced by blooming cacti. Really, really beautiful. And many are edible. Ocotillo is blooming, too.






Oh, and grape leaves are EVERYWHERE. They are a sour treat for any summer hike...they are literally everywhere. I am never not eating grape leaves during summer hikes.

Here's Squaw Butte.

And this is the picture of me when I was in that polygamist colony in southern Utah. I was fourteen and was the seventh wife of a man named Isaiah Jacob Brenneman. Surely I told you guys about that before, right?

Top Twenty Overprostituted Guilty Pleasures

Today did not work out as planned. I missed everything I was supposed to make it to today. It was one of those domino effects....being late to one thing kept me from hitting the next...I ended up spending unnecessary money and wasting time. Just one of those rotten days. But--I never got hit by a car, no one told me that they hated me, I didn't kill any babies. So it could have been worse. WAY worse.

In any case, I feel like somewhat of a waste of space today and it makes me a bit confessional. So here it is. CONFESSIONS.

There is a list of over-played, over-prostituted songs one might hear on the radio that I never tire of. Some of these songs that I love so dearly I will openly admit are repulsive and even poor-quality and I agree with you on how hokey and horrible and despicable some of them may be. But. For some ungodly reason, whenever one of these songs comes on the radio, not only am I pleased to hear it, I get these tingles of excitement that YES, I LOVE this song, they are playing this song for ME, and even while I am thinking this very thought, I also know that I would take that secret with me to my grave. That is, until tonight.

So without further ado, the top 20 list of over-played songs that I will never get sick of, that I will never not want to dance on the tables to, songs that I will turn up loud when I'm driving or doing the dishes just so long as no one else is around, songs that I will scan classic rock and easy listening stations for, songs that I hope people ask Delilah to play for them. *commence kazoo fanfare*


20. Dancing in the Moonlight -- Toploader
19. Crash -- Dave Matthews
18. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone -- The Monkees
17. Play Me -- Neil Diamond
16. Time After Time -- Cyndi Lauper
15. Cat's in the Cradle -- Harry Chapin
14. From a Distance -- Bette Midler
13. Kiss from a Rose -- Seal
12. Everything I Do -- Bryan Adams
11. Everybody Wants to Rule the World -- Tears for Fears
10. Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime -- Paul McCartney
9. Return to Pooh Corner -- Kenny Loggins
8. More Than Words -- Extreme
7. Place in this World -- Michael W. Smith
6. Yesterday -- The Beatles
5. Yellow Brick Road -- Elton John
4. Forever Young -- Alphaville
3. I Saw the Sign -- Ace of Base
2. I've Got My Mind Set on You -- George Harrison
1. For the Longest Time -- Billy Joel

So go on, judge me. Bring it. These songs have faithfully made me grin since before I even hit puberty. I love them! I will never tire of them! I want them played at my deathbed! ...Maybe!! So dish it out now, you hypocrits. What are your guilty overplayed pleasures that you pretend like you hate but secretly get all stoked up from. I'm sure we share some.

(Post Script: I wanted to place Cat's Peace Train and Gordon's Carefree Highway to the list, but they aren't quite as despicable as the rest, though they are quite overplayed. Consider them honorary mentions.)

I bet Etta Place really did teach English for a while.......

Fate has spoken. The stars have aligned. I am taking a less-traveled road that will one day seem to have made all the difference, after all. A boarding school with a campus in Saratoga Springs and a campus in Spanish Fork has asked me to be their English teacher, beginning June 16th (the Europe trip once again being placed on hold). The students are at-risk girls, much like who I'm working with here in Arizona, and the school specializes in equine therapy....horse whispering or something akin. I'm going to be a real English teacher. Today is a gloriously sunny day. I'm to begin choosing texts immediately...I can teach whatever I want, whomever authors/poets I want, and during the summer, Friday is fieldtrip day and I can take them wherever I want. They've asked me to check out what plays are being performed in Cedar City this summer--I get to teach Shakespeare and then take my girls down to see the play in August.....this thrills me. I'm too blessed. I'm incredibly excited.

And I may be moving to Provo, God forbid it. My Provo readers need to give me an honest appraisal of the Utah county situation and if I shouldn't head on towards Springville or Lehi or even commute from further north to avoid the legions of BYU freshmen that will force me into an early grave (considering I am an ancient old maid already to most of them)....I know there's at least two of you out there....come on Provonians, tell it to me straight.

I'm sad to leave Arizona. I'm quite certain that I'll end up living in the Utah deserts during evenings and weekends. I'd really like to learn to fly fish. Are there places to fly fish near Spanish Fork? I hear the rock climbing is all right, too. I like to think that I'll be living out my next few years like a young Katharine Ross......26-year-old English teacher hanging out with Western outlaws and keeping them in line while I help them bust into South American banks, and then, hopefully, I'll find a Dustin Hoffman to burst into the temple doors someday yelling, "Emily! Emily!" and waving a large wooden cross so I don't end up marrying some strange Provo man I don't really love. It will be very dramatic I hope, and I will be very beautiful. Fingers crossed! Anyway, just wanted to lay down the word--I'm moving back to Utah. *cue very formidable and conclusive metal door slamming shut*

Thoughts on mistletoe.....

After six months of reminding myself to research mistletoe from seeing it suck away at the lives of junipers and cottonwoods in the desert, I finally did a little low-key research on this parasitic symbol of love and courtship. Thought it might make an interesting blog. We'll see.

So it ends up that mistletoe most likely derives from the German Mist meaning dung and Tang meaning branch, reason being that birds eat the seeds, crap them out onto branches where they sneak their way into the tree's core a la Sigourney Weaver's nemesis in Alien. After five weeks or so of digging their way in chigger-style, the mistletoe copycats the tree's branch scheme as well as it can and sprouts itself from the tree, oddly brighter and yellower in color and dropping white, semen-filled berries for further domination. According to my friend Dodge as he told it apathetically to my band of girls one sunny afternoon in November, the mistletoe, like the romance it represents, will find a host and feed on it until both the tree and the mistletoe weaken and die together, leaving only the broken shell of the original tree and wilted rotting mistletoe all around the ground beneath it. Oh what baggage, oh what destruction. Oh, the sentimentality of it all!


In the areas of the desert I have walked, mistletoe leaves a bloody trail of leafless branches stretching bare and naked toward the sky while several clumps of mistletoe leech away at their last breaths, mocking the host trees by bearing their own leaves and fruits that deny the tree its own posterity. My girls used to gather the mistletoe to hang in our camps during the Christmas season, but we somberly quit as we followed the path of arboreal carnage the mistletoe parasites left in their wake. Hanging mistletoe felt like celebrating the Charles Manson of trees, like honoring the vampiric extent this plant takes for survival. And it surely made us at least half as cynical about love and romance as our friend Dodge was.

We most likely owe the Vikings for the kissing traditions. Balder was the Viking god of the summer sun (this legend makes for an appropriate Arizonan April trail tale). Anyway, Balder dreamed he was going to die. His mother flipped out because she knew that if Balder died, everything on the earth would die with him. Her name was Frigga and she was the goddess of love and beauty. Since she's Viking, let's assume she would kick Aphrodite's ass if they cage fought each other.


Well, Frigga did what only a mother would think to do, and she went to all the plants and animals on the planet and asked that they would be kind to her son because he was a good boy. The consequences of Mom's words were typical--it was as bad for Balder as it was for any young boy who walks towards to the junior high's front doors only to have his mom call out, "I love you, Pumpkinpants!" in front of all the jocks that hang out in the foyer until twenty minutes into first period--Balder had more rocks thrown at him in teasing than any of the other young gods and goddesses. Frigga was pretty powerful, though, so nothing worse than broken eyeglass rims ever happened to him.

That is, until this other boy god, Loki, found out that mistletoe had no sway against Frigga's power because mistletoe was not plant or animal as it has no roots of its own, no identity without a branch to leech from. Loki was as low as you could go......I'm not sure who would win a cage fighting match between Loki and Shakespeare's Iago. That's how bad. Loki not only made a poisoned dart from the mistletoe but he also tricked Balder's blind brother Hoder to shoot it into Balder for him. Balder died. Loki was a real bastard.

Here's where those tried and true Christianity parallels and Jung's collective unconscious comes into play. Three days after Balder jumped the Great Boa as they say somewhere, Frigga's tears washed the mistletoe's red coloring off from all its berries and washed them white as snow (or white as semen most Druids would say) and this miraculously raised Balder from the dead. Frigga was so thrilled and grateful for mistletoe afterward that whenever she saw it she got so damned excited she'd kiss anybody and everybody standing underneath it. Which is kind of a nice story and I like that kind of kissing more than the awkward, aw geez, we're both standing under the mistletoe...are we supposed to make out? type of kissing mistletoe pushes these days.


So, a happy ending. Also, it ends up mistletoe isn't so bad after all, botanically speaking. Mistletoe among juniper trees, for example, actually encourages more juniper berries to sprout before the tree chokes up under the mistletoe's grip. More birds and animals come for more juniper berries and the result concludes with more animals and juniper trees in that area than before the mistletoe arrived. What a paradox, huh? Also, mistletoe from some trees are so plush and bunchy that birds get giddy over them and make their nests there in the high branches. So, that seems positive.

Conclusion: love is a leech that can suck you dry and the romance might well die right along with your soul. But cry it out and you will live again. Sure. That's the way this big round ball keeps on keeping on. There are times and there are seasons and there's always another spring and another. We can only hope that if we are so lucky for romance and mistletoe to stick its parasitic tentacle against the soft meshy skins of our metaphysical aortas, that at least we can have the strength to live with these growths long enough that we both survive to fill our neck of the woods with plenty of birds' nests and juniper berries and happy little animal families a good long while. Then, if we all die together, it's romantic and meaningful, just like Old Dan and Little Ann, those timeless beloved coondogs that couldn't live without their love, and a red fern grows between them. The only book I ever saw my father cry in. So that's something. Mistletoe. Finally researched it.