I just returned from some errands in Burlington and in one of those wonderful spots where you can see Mount Mansfield even though you’re surrounded by concrete, traffic and stores I looked up.  The sunset was full on the mountain so that it looked like it was covered in pink snow.  I stared and thought oh my, God!

I know you’ve been waiting with baited breath – be still your heart -  here are my much anticipated New Year Resolutions.

Be Taller
I’ve been 5’3” since I was about 15 and I’m pretty damn tired of it. I’m thinking 5’7” should be about right. I’ll look thinner for one thing and I won’t have to take up the hem on any more pants.

Be A Wanton Sex Goddess
I’ve actually done this before and had quite a bit of fun so I think I’ll do it again. If you know a man who might be interested in participating please pass along his number.

Be More Intelligent
Well not really – I’m just going to acquire a British accent and people will think I’m more intelligent.

Date a Billionaire
Especially if he has a yacht – I really need some time in the sun. Okay this is actually part of my Wanton Sex Goddess resolution.   Note:  I don’t want to actually keep him – just play with him for awhile.

Swear More
I’ve noticed that I always have more fun when I let the swear words fly so that’s what I’m gonna do!

Wear More Red
I look good in it, it makes my eyes look blue, and I’m thinking it will help achieve my goal to be a Wanton Sex Goddess.

Wear Absolutely Silly Shoes This Summer & Paint My Toe Nails Slut Red

So let me say this first – I get depressed in November and December when there’s no sunshine.  Armed with that disclaimer you can decide if you want to read any further – just don’t tell me if you didn’t read my heartfelt soul baring because it would really hurt my feelings.

When I decided to move to Vermont no one warned me that I would spend two months every year growing more morose by the minute while the sun went on vacation.  Even if someone had tried to warn me I probably would have just brushed it off – oh I love a cloudy day.  And that was absolutely true – in Texas.

I know that Texans are prone to bragging and it might sound like that’s what I’m doing but it’s not bragging if it’s the truth and the truth is that the sun shines pretty much all the time in Texas.  Even when it rains the water pours out of the sky like Niagara Falls and then the sun comes right back out.  Believe me – if you live in the land of eternal sunshine a cloudy day can be a welcome change.

So  I’m in Vermont in the depth of dismal, gloomy, dreariness wondering how I wound up here and romanticizing my old sunshine-filled life.  Now I’m old enough to have had several lives back in the Lone Star state so hold on a minute while I put on my rose-colored glasses and take a look at what I left behind.

First there was the life that was expected of a gal back in the good ole days – finish high school, marry someone from my church, live around the corner from my parents, have two or three babies, cook everything from scratch, make my daughters’ clothes, bandage their booboos, and grow prize winning begonias.

Here I go bragging again but I was really good at this life.  I was the June Cleaver of Arlington Texas — I could bake cookies for the PTA meeting, wallpaper the kitchen, feed the babies, and mow the yard all at the same time.  I mostly loved being a domestic diva but eventually my marriage lost its luster, the wallpaper peeled, and the grass all died.  It was definitely time for a grand adventure!

I got a divorce, sold the house with the manicured lawn, bought some Birkenstocks and became a hippie college student smoking pot on my front porch in a little college town in North Central Texas.  I had the time of my life.  My sole goal was to read everything I could get my hands on, have a never-ending supply of girlfriends to sit on the porch with me, and have a long string of superficial affairs with much younger men.  It was a beautiful plan and it worked great for six years.

You know being a student is a wonderful thing.  Sleep ‘til noon and nobody blinks an eye.  Stay up all night smoking pot and then hit IHOP at 4:00 am and people smile knowingly and punch you on the shoulder.  AND if you’re too damn old to be acting like a brazen hussie people give you a high-five and say, “you go girl.”

I’m in desperate need of a new adventure.  I want to sell the house, buy a motorcycle and take off for Mexico.  I want to dance naked by the campfire while a longhaired golden man plays the drums or sit on a rock in the desert and howl at the moon — but it’s eleven degrees outside so there won’t be any naked dancing, motorcycle riding, or howling at least not until spring comes again which of course it doesn’t do in Vermont until June.

So I’m living vicariously through my daughter right now.  What are you and Maggie doing?  Oh we’re playing on the swings and watching the birds. How warm is it?  Oh it’s probably 75. Is the sun shining?  Yeah but we’ve got a cold front moving in and it’s supposed to drop to around 40 tomorrow.  Don’t tell me that, just let me live in the 75 degree sunshine for a few minutes – I can almost feel it through the phone – I can smell the grass and Maggie’s sweet little hatless head.

As long as I can get sunny vacations in my mind I think I can hold out until January when the sun comes back to Vermont.  I mean I’ve made it through eight years and I haven’t gone berserk yet – well not in any way that shows when I’m out in public.

So I’ve got a brand new career direction — I’ve decided to become a handygal!.  Now don’t laugh at me ‘til you hear me out.

I know this seems an unlikely profession for someone who describes herself as girlie and stands on the side of the road with her skirt pulled up when she gets a flat tire but there are extenuating circumstances – namely my mother.

It’s completely her fault – she’s forced me into it. The woman is a slave driver and there’s absolutely nothing she can’t do.  As long as she’s got a wrench, a screwdriver, and some duct tape she is not going to pay anyone to come out and fix anything.

She’s always been that way – cheap and determined!  I remember calling her one day when she was in her 70s and my dad saying she’d have to call me back because she was patching the roof!  She’s 91 now and if her balance weren’t a little off she’d be up on the roof right now repairing the leak over the back porch.

The thing she specializes in is shaming me into helping her.  Ya know we could take a little of that foam stuff and some electrical tape and fix that right up  – that’s what I did when my pipes were leaking back on Virginia Lane.  I wouldn’t pay a plumber to do that.

During September we painted the garage doors and the backyard fence, cleaned out the garage and pretty much emptied the basement.  We (and I do mean we) loaded up and carted off five loads of recycling, 20 cans of dried paint, pieces of lumber, screen windows, lead pipes, newspaper clippings of JFK’s funeral, and endless greeting cards from the last 30 years.

Just before we decided to clean the basement – well actually, it would be more accurate to say just before I succumbed to pressure to clean the basement – the drainpipe from our washer sprang a leak.  In an effort to appease my mom I tried to figure out exactly what was wrong and avoid calling a plumber — so I took the rubber hose out of the drainpipe and laid it on the floor.

You can see it coming can’t you?  Yep, I forgot all about the hose and did a load of laundry — wound up with two inches of water in the basement.

That night my mom dreamed that all the water disappeared and so help me god the next day when I put on my waders and headed down into the basement the water was indeed all gone!  Now where the hell did it go?   I don’t know but I do know that I’m paying a lot more attention to my mom’s dreams.

So you’re thinking what’s so bad about having a mom who will tackle anything and even makes problems go away in her sleep?  You’re probably also thinking that the woman deserves a little credit for still painting fences and such at the age of 91 and you would be right.

What irks me is that everyone who meets her falls in love with her.  I mean the woman can charm the horns off a billy goat.  I’m exhausted from all the jobs she’s lined up for me and she stands there and grabs all the glory!

What you don’t know about my mama is that this sweet lady with the big smile and the quaint drawl wears boots and carries a whip.  I’m telling you that she could go bear huntin’ with a switch and sometimes the bear she’s huntin’ is me!

Tonight it all comes to an end!  So you’re probably thinking I’m talking about the election — and I am but not in the way you think.  What comes to an end for me is my mama worrying herself into a frenzy of anxiety that John McCain might actually win.

The woman is scared to death.  Months ago she was scared that Barack Obama was going to beat Hillary Clinton.  Eight years ago she was scared that Bush would beat Gore and of course we all know how that turned out.  Four years ago it was Kerry & Bush.

On Saturday we took a trip down to democratic headquarters just to get infused with a jolt of Obama fever.  All the young men immediately fell in love with mom – there’s just something about a 91 year-old woman calling George Bush that ole bastard that’s hard to resist.

You should try watching CNN with her sometime.  She provides a constant feed of commentary – John McCain’s thumbs up stance, Sarah Palin’s stammering, Dick Cheney’s jowls – they’re all fodder for mom’s unswerving devotion to democrats.

Mom comes by her opinions honestly – she’s from a long line of yellow-dog democrats.  For those of you who aren’t fortunate enough to be from Texas that means she would vote for an ole yellow-dog if it were running on the democratic ticket.

So we voted two weeks ago and mom voted a straight Democratic ticket.  If there was more than one candidate and one was a woman she voted for her.  She’s got her Obama sign in the front yard, she’s wearing her Obama t-shirt with her Obama pin, and she’s twiddling her thumbs until the election results start coming in at 7:00.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now my mama shines really bright.

I was halfway into a red-eye from San Francisco to Boston with my granddaughter in tow when a sharp stabbing pain hit me on the left side of my chest.  Hmm, I said – probably bursitis or something.  I’m not really sure what bursitis is but I remember my grandmother mentioning it when she had a pain somewhere.

Then the middle of my chest started hurting.  Hmm, I said – probably acid reflux.  I do have acid reflux so this was not a completely unreasonable assumption.  Then the burning and pressure began spreading throughout my chest and my left arm started tingling.  Hmm, I said – possibly a heart attack.  The question was, what to do about it?

I’d read somewhere that an aspirin taken at the onset of a heart attack cuts the chance of death by, well I don’t know how much, but a big enough number to make it an attractive option. I thought, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll take an aspirin and survive long enough to land in Boston, get my granddaughter back to her parents, drive to Vermont and then maybe tell my doctor about it on my next flu-shot visit.

Now I can see with the benefit of hindsight that there was a possibly fatal flaw in my logic but at the time it seemed a reasonable alternative to asking for help.  After all, the two-ton elephant that was sitting on my chest might turn out to only be a panic attack and then I would have bothered everyone for nothing which is something I am loath to do — don’t want to go bothering people now do we?

So what persuaded me to get out of my seat and ask a flight attendant for help?  It was the vision of my granddaughter waking up next to a dead Mimi!  I might be overly concerned with being a nuisance but I love my granddaughter like a house afire and she trumps everything.

One thing you should know, in case you ever wind up pacing up and down the aisle of an airplane thinking that you can’t have a heart attack because that would mean going to the hospital with dirty underwear and a hole in your sock is that once you tell a flight attendant that you’re having chest pains and she’s summoned the obligatory “doctor on board,” the situation is pretty much out of your hands.  The ambulance and the EMTs are going to meet the plane and you are going to the hospital no matter how fervently you promise to drive yourself.

Once I accepted the futility of protest my primary worry was that my granddaughter might be frightened.  Oh “vanity thy name is woman.”  She could not have been more thrilled by the exciting turn of events.  She got to sit in first class and eat free chocolate!  Then she got to ride in an ambulance and was the hit of the emergency room.  Her day just kept getting better and better.

So when they wheeled me into Massachusetts General Hospital there were at least ten young, eager interns waiting to get a crack at me – maybe I would go into cardiac arrest and they would get to use the paddles or maybe it was a brain tumor and surgery would be their ticket to the big time.

When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to die the same interns who only minutes before had all eyes on me began to yawn and wander off.  Now there is absolutely no part of me that wanted to die but when they moved me and my super comfy gurney into the hallway to make room for sick people and showed me how to unhook my own heart monitor in case I needed to go to the bathroom I have to admit that I kinda felt rejected – I mean I thought these people liked me.

The good news is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my heart.  The bad news is that all that pain was likely caused by the 250 diet cokes I had consumed over the previous two days.  Yeah, yeah, I know that someone with acid reflux shouldn’t be drinking diet cokes but that’s like telling a teenage girl from Dallas that all that mascara makes her look cheap!  It might make you feel good to say it but it’ll do about as much good as spittin’ into the wind.

So my granddaughter and I had a grand adventure – the Golden Gate Bridge, Muir Woods, China Town, the mountains of Santa Cruz, and a more-fun-than-I-could-stand trip to the emergency room.  Along the way I learned that driving across that great bridge through the fog is an exercise in trust, that my granddaughter is a great travel buddy, that people will truly help you if you ask, and than even if you think your hospital gown covers your butt you should keep your underwear on and hold the strings very tightly.