Good Grief! My mailbox exploded today! Okay, okay, I get the picture. I am remorse and shamed by all of your dear comments. I have been delinquent, dewired, and deserve to have my dewlaps pinched. I am bowed and contrite.

I fell off the blog train from working too many hours, too many days a week. And then I missed the next blog train while sleeping for a week straight, or two, or three. By then I'd forgotten all my computer passwords, I knew the mailbox would be bursting at the seams with spam mail that hid the few gems of real mail beneath it and who has time to deal with that even if you remember your passwords. And finally, I realized I haven't read a book in over a year while working too hard and I marched to Border's, bought $113 worth of books, wandered home and hibernated with them for another week or two or three. Hence the dewlap reference. Mind you I don't have a dewlap but a certain turkey does mentioned in one of the animal books I'm reading.

I seem to have radar about choosing the right book at the right time. Amid unsatisfactory performance reviews dished out to recalcitrant employees, volleying sexual harassment charges between more employees, and way too much time spent with people who take themselves and their sense of entitlement way too seriously, what I needed and found was a book by Jon Katz, "The Dogs of Bedlam Farm," which made me laugh out loud on nearly every page.

I'm very cautious about reading books about animals because too many authors take the easy way out of engendering emotion in a reader by relating some horrific story about an animal suffering or an animal dying. It makes me furious. Such laziness by writers. So imagine my intense glee when I found Jon Katz say in the early pages of his book that he was taking the advice of a reader who showed up at one of his readings and insisted that he write a book where no dog dies. And so he promised me the same. And so, I could relax into the book, enjoying the humor as well as the keen instrospection he did about the mysterious relationships that develop between an animal and a human being without worrying what disaster may be coming in the next chapter.

When I was twelve (in the 1950's) I read Marjorie Kinan Rawlings book, "The Yearling." I was living in Florida at the time only miles from where she actually lived in Cross Creek and wrote her books. She was a guest at my great Aunt's house and according to family legend, came there to visit when she needed to "dry out." I wonder if that was really true or if my relatives just wanted a tangential touch of fame. At any rate, I had no problem with her until I discovered near the end of the book that Flag, a fawn that had been tamed by a boy, caused such a nusiance to neighbor's gardens that he was shot.

I was sitting on a porch swing at the time I read that. Spanish moss was swaying on the humid breeze. It was summer vacation from school, my father had just died, and my mother gave me the summer off from household chores to simply read books, and heal from the grief.

In a flash I understood the sense of grief and how people barter it for their own purposes. In Marjorie's case, perhaps there had been too much alcohol to trust her own instincts of how to write without resorting to the manipulation of a reader's emotions. At any rate, I leaped from the swing, threw the book against the side of the porch several times, ripped out every one of it's pages, stomped on them, and promised myself that when I grew up and became a writer, I WOULD NEVER resort to such tactics. And I haven't.

I still have seven other books from the gluttonous raid on Border's but I'm pacing myself these days and venturing back into domains I haunted before the meltdown. Like here. I am contrite. And very glad to hear from you all and each and every one of you are a dear and a luv.

I am currently reading about Christopher Hogwood, a swine known and loved by residents of a small town in Vermont. And I am remembering the advice given to Jon Katz by one of his no nonsense neighbor farmers who got sick of seeing him meltdown over every disaster, and who gave Jon the following three rules to live by. I shall take his advice.

I never would have agreed to joining a Vegan group for their monthly vegetarian dinner at a local restaurant unless it was the only way I would get to meet a key figure in networking to write a proposed Delaware legislative Bill to promote the prevention of puppy mill puppies from being sold in the state of Delaware.

For one thing, I’m not a vegetarian. For another thing, vegetarians tend to curl their lip at the odor of cigarette smoke on my clothes and my beefy breath left over from my lunch. No matter how you look at it, mixing Caroline and vegetarians is not a good idea. Philosophically I may have a vegetarian heart but my stomach is wholly and indelibly a carnivore.

Before my target member arrived, I had time to peruse the vegetarian section of the Vietnamese menu but my eye kept being pulled back to the other section where crispy duck with lemon grass was offered. I decided to send up a trial balloon to see if the Vegans already present at the table for ten believed in supporting “diversity” at their table.

“Excuse me,” I asked ever so politely. “But would anyone be offended if I ordered Duck?”

“It just isn’t done,” was the reply I received. Okay, so much for diversity.

Well alright, why not just wave a red flag in front of my face. “Just not done?” “JUST NOT DONE???” The last time someone told me that something was “Just not done,” was when I was seven years old and organized a sit-in of my 1956 fellow female second graders who demanded that being expected to wear dresses and not corduroy slacks on winter days with temperatures below zero was unrealistic and we DEMANDED to be allowed to wear slacks if we were forced to be outside during recess.

The other little girls cracked under the scrutiny of Miss Elaine Brader, a schoolteacher of 71 years who could melt your pigtails with her stare from ten yards; but I held firm and enjoyed a toasty winter’s recess in the comfort of corduroy. An outcast, but a warm outcast.

But this time it was a Friday night. I was very tired from an enormous week of work and I decided not to take a stand on ducks. I asked for recommendations from the vegetarian menu which ironically were all labeled with animal parts. “Abalone and mixed vegetables.” “Pork in Oyster Sauce.” “Beef and Black Mushrooms.”

I was informed by misspellings on the menu that the meat was “arteficial.” I queried if that meant tofu or textured vegetable protein. No one seemed to know, including the waiter. I heard whispers from the Vegans that they weren’t even sure if it was “truly” vegetarian.”

I tried to wrap my mind around these concepts and squash the questions that burned in my empty stomach that was begging for the partially cooked flesh of beasts. “You aren’t offended by the vegetarian menu using the terms beef, chicken, abalone, shrimp to describe your vegetarian dishes AND you don’t have ANY idea what it’s made of? I was met with shrugs of shoulders not unlike the 1956 little girls who just wanted to distance themselves from my probing questions as they turned their backs and giggled and slithered away.

Okay. I ordered the “Beef” and Black Mushrooms. By this time, my target member has arrived and we lost ourselves in discussion of legislation possibilities and how to approach Delaware legislators who have never entertained the idea of passing an animal protection act to benefit companion animals.

When my entrée arrived, and I use the term entrée here very loosely, I was happy to discover the pea pods were perfectly al dente, the sauce was pungent and superb, but the “beef” had an ominous and unpalatable look to it. It reminded me of a morel mushroom, a short tapered stubby little thing, pocked with indentations and appearing quite flaccid on the plate. The more I thought of the term “flaccid” the more I was unable to envision actually putting it in my mouth.

I’m not a rude person by nature. I can understand being a dinner guest who might actually roll up a cabbage leaf containing a worm and eat it to prevent embarrassing your hostess as one guest did for Mrs. Vanderbilt at one of her important social dinners; but God help me, it was an involuntary act that caused me to spit out the first bit of a piece of “beef” masquerading as a flaccid morel masquerading as any form of edibility and exclaim far too loudly, “Good God, that is the most disgusting and revolting thing I have ever put in my mouth in my life.”

For a split second, you could hear a pin drop. Chins dropped at nearby tables, the waiter knowing very little English nodded vigorously and smiled at me, and the Vegan next to me tried to wrestle my plate away from me and scrape it onto her plate where no more scenes would be caused. But, no, oh no, I insisted on calling the manager over and telling him once again that he should be ashamed of himself for serving such a thing when his spring rolls were divine and his hot tea was sublime.

I was not invited to attend next month’s dinner meeting of the Vegan group. An outcast. And a hungry one.

It's an interesting idea to contemplate the concept of "work," "too much work," "not enough work," "workaholism." Our ancestors didn't have to worry about such concepts. Get up, find food, slay dragons, battle saber-toothed tigers, find more food, sleep, and then do it again the next day.

These days we are paid to do other things so we don't have to hunt for food or battle dragons and saber-toothed tigers. It's a very odd concept when you think about it. Very odd. We are told that this is necessary so that we will have more time to "play."

In the past two weeks, I've slayed two dragons, rustled up some grub, contemplated the incredible clouds and balmy Spring days, and I've thought a lot about what our "job" is all about. It's interesting that there are always those who are very ready to remind us of what our "job" is all about complete with a stopwatch to time us and a list of job descriptions that make your head spin. Wife, mother, friend, colleague, woman, man, child, dog. They all come with job descriptions rarely of our own making.

I've enjoyed "working" too much, sleeping too little, spending "too much time" on watching clouds and how the marsh grass seems to whisper hello and goodbye to the migrating waterfowl. Hey, it's my JOB.

It's good to see all of you again and I will be bringing back photos and stories of work and play. Soon, very soon.