Today is just ahhh

Women continue to amaze me with their strength and perseverance and now I can add one more name to that ever growing list: Diana Nyad.  Egads what a role model for us to follow.  Setting a goal and against all odds, not stopping until it's done.  And those odds were pretty scary ones: sharks, jellyfish, cramps, dehydration, and physical pressures beyond that which most of us could tolerate.  Add to that her age of 64, and I'm even more impressed.  Damn, women are the nuts.

Now on to what's shakin': with two loaves of pumpkin bread in the oven, I have a few minutes to take five before I whip out Mr. Ironing board and commence flattening pieces of clothing.  I already have a pile to go to the cleaners for them to do, that are just way beyond my endurance (tolerance).  Sis is on her chair in the den snoozing so all is right in the world or at least it seems that way.

As I was making the pumpkin bread batter I was thinking how smells, sounds--sense memories--are so deeply buried until we see, hear, feel, or smell something that pulls them out of the depths of our brain.  Cinnamon is always Fall for me.  Lavender is an ahhhh smell that takes me to Lake Austin Resort.  The smell and sounds of the lakes in the Hill Country are always Camp Longhorn for me and in fact, one night walking back to my room, I flashed back to when I was a counselor at Longhorn walking through the camp at night.  I thought about things, people, places, and foods--always foods--that I hadn't thought about in almost 40 years, that were part of my Longhorn years.  The sounds of the cicadas, the lapping of the water against the shore or the dock, the lizard on the path, and the familiar smell was pure Hill Country.  I don't know any other way to describe it.  The lakes there just smell different than here.  The plants are different, the water's different, and most delicious of all are those rolling hills with all the different trees. No wonder it smells different.  And the water....it sounds different to me too.  There's a softness, a gentleness, that I don't experience in the lakes around Dallas.

Another smell I remembered was the smell of Johnson's baby cream that came in the little white jar.  It smells just like J and J baby powder but was for dry or irritated tail feathers (diaper rash) or whatever else ailed you.  I loved that stuff because of the smell.   Anybody besides me old enough to remember the smell of Sweetheart soap?  I remember the smell from a Bluebird project we did once at a friends house.  I had never smelled it before since mom had never bought that soap brand, but I loved it.  I was hooked at the first sniff.

And speaking of smells.....I think my pumpkin bread is ready.  Uummmm. Toasted with a little butter is to die for.