There once was a house, standing deep in the woods; in this house lived a family of bears. There was Mama and Papa and Baby, and a girl with bright yellow hair.

One day the three bears had worked several hours gathering their honey for storage; Then they all took a break so Mama could make a pot of thier favorite porridge.

But when they sat down with their bowls all around , they found the porridge was too hot. So they went for a stroll while the porridge grew cold, but the yellow haired girl they forgot. 

The wee little girl with the bright yellow curls was just waking up from her nap. The food smelled divine, so she sat down to dine with a napkin over her lap.

Then she ate it all up, draining every cup, whilst sitting in Baby Bear's chair. The chair then did splinter like ice in the winter giving the poor child such a scare, that she ran far away to the deep woods to stay, frightened of what might transpire when the three bears came home and found their soup gone and saw Baby Bear's poor broken chair. 

When the bears returned for their dinner and saw that the wee girl was gone, they forgot about food and ran into the woods to find her and bring her back home.

"It was only a chair," said Baby Bear "and Papa will make it like new."

"Why surely," said Papa "I might make a rocker and I'll even make one for you too."

Mama bear smiled and scooped up the child and brushed back her bright yellow curls. She gave her a hug and said with a shrug, "Let's go home now, my sweet little girl. I can always make more pots of porridge and Papa can make many chairs, but nowhere in the world is there another sweet girl like you, with your bright yellow hair."

So the wee little girl with the bright yellow curls and her Mama and Papa and Brother held hands, skipped and sang, as back home they came, and they all ate fresh porridge for supper.

© Leeuna Foster, 2006.  All rights Reserved. 

May not be reproduced without the author's written consent. 

Did you ever have one of those days?

The kind where you can't see the humor in anything,  no matter how hard you try?

That's how my day started out. I got out of bed (that was my first mistake) at 7 am.  After fifty cups of coffee and 49 trips to the bathroom, I sat down to the computer to write.
 
It wasn't  happening.  I think I wrote the same paragraph fourteen times, juxtaposed, rewrote, edited, deleted, added more words, then deleted everything and began again.

I wonder if  Erma Bombeck ever had that problem. She was always funny. My lips would always began to curve upward the moment I spotted her byline at the top of her column.

I wonder if other humorists have this problem.

Maybe it's just the state of things...

In order to write humor, one must think funny.  A hard thing to do in this day and age, when everything seems to be falling  apart like a stale cracker.

Maybe it's the price of gasoline...

No longer can we country folk afford the luxury of going out for a Sunday drive. We have to make one trip into town count for the entire week. We have to grocery shop, do our banking, go sightseeing, eat out, see a movie, pick up the grand kids, go visit Aunt Vienne, go to the library, attend church services, browse through the flea market, then pray all the way home that we have enough fumes left in the gas tank to get the car all the way into the driveway.

And Nixon once made the statement that gas would NEVER exceed the price of one dollar per gallon. Oh yeah, he also said "I am NOT a crook!"...

Then again, Maybe it's a sign of age!

I used to think everything was funny. Once I even started  laughing during a funeral. Now that was embarrassing. The more I tried to stop, the funnier it all seemed. People were staring at me so I held my hankie over my face and shook until the tears flowed down my cheeks. Half the mourners came over to console me, thinking I was a grieving relative.

My shrink would say that it was just a manifestation of Social Anxiety. Must have been,  cause afterwards I can't even remember what I was laughing about in the first place.

I used to laugh when I, or anyone else, fell down. Falling was like a knee jerk to me. You fall--you laugh. Not anymore. I watch my step very carefully...like I am walking around in a barn yard full of chickens. (If you've ever been around chickens, then you know WHY one needs to step carefully).

I finally gave up on writing and decided to take a break and check out my email for the day. I logged into my account and there was enough spam in my inbox to feed a family of twelve. 

Most of it was advertisements. Everything from Viagra to detergent.

Then there was all those email from friends. The ones that tell you to read it and forward it to twenty people, within the next three seconds, or the roof would fall in on your head. I delete these emails, but for some odd reason, It bothers me. I feel nervous and I spend the day in constant fear.

Why would my FRIENDS do that? I'm glad I don't get email from my enemies!

Then there are those email messages that say that if I don't forward the email it means I don't love Jesus. Well I do love Jesus but would He really want me to inflict these emails on  others?

I do forward the email...to myself...at all my other email accounts on the Internet. I have about thirty now and I usually take one day out of the month to empty them. (note to myself: empty junk email boxes)

Is it any wonder that I'm not feeling too humorous at this point in time?

Will somebody send me a funny joke!! Please!!

Oh my, how I envy those Morning Glory People.

They are the ones who wake up before the rooster crows, stretch like a cat, jump out of bed and into the shower and then into their clothes. In ten minutes tops they have the beds made and breakfast on the table. Five minutes later they're dancing out the door like Dorthy on her way to see the Wizard. I hate these people. I'm green with envy.

Me? It takes me longer than that to hear the alarm going off.  I get out of bed looking like the female version of Kramer. On my good mornings I might have on one slipper. Trying not to stretch anything, I walk into the walls and bang my elbows on every door frame on the way to the kitchen.

I always make the coffee at night because pouring a cup is about all I can manage in the mornings. (it's worth the bitter acid taste just to have it ready).

When I was out in the work force, I always got out of bed one hour earlier than was necessary just so I would have some extra time to stumble around, and not talk to anyone or have a single thought.

We have a rule in my house. Unless you are dying or the house is on fire, do not speak to me until I have had my coffee. I am incapable of speech or thought for at least thirty minutes, two cups of bitter coffee and a cigarette. (ohhh. That's ignorant I know, but I still smoke!)

My sister-in-law is a morning glory. I think if I went to her house at five o'clock in the morning, she would have already had her shower, her face would be made up and every hair would be in place. The beds would be made and she would have done 27 loads of laundry, dusted, vaccumed, washed the windows and rearanged the garbage and be sitting on the back porch watching the sunrise while sipping her coffee.

Hubby once toyed with the idea of buying a small farm, complete with cows, pigs and chickens.
"Wouldn't it be great being a farmer's wife? I can just picture us milking the cows, slopping the hogs and gathering fresh eggs early in the morning."

"How early?" I squealed.

"Way before sunrise" he answered, a twinkle in his eye.

After he broke open an ammonia capsule, waved it  under my nose and brought me to, he told me he was just kidding.

What a relief!  I don't milk anything except the jar of CoffeMate that early.

Hey, anybody out there got diabetes?

Well, if you're shaped like a pear and you're from the South where the three main food groups are flour, sugar and lard, (pronounced shortening for you Northern folk) then you have a good chance of developing it.

It ain't no picnic, and about as aggravating as a loose tooth.

I wasn't always round. I was a very skinny child, all hair and eyeballs.  I have naturally curly hair and my mama refused to let me cut it until I was thirty or there abouts.  You could have drawn big round eyes on a rag mop and stood us up side by side and we would have been twins.

I ate what everyone else ate, but I stayed skinny, all the way through school and up until my fourth marriage. I've always felt  that fat people were happy people. My sister remarked on my weight gain and told me to get miserable for a change. "I swear , if you get any happier you won't be able to fit through the kitchen door."

Well, turns out she was right. I was pushing against 200 pounds this time last year. I kept feeling sick, and short of breath. My eyes didn't work right and I had about as much energy as a dead house cat. All of this combined was a pretty good sign that I needed to see a doctor. I did. He did the blood work. He told me I had developed type 2 diabetes.

The normal range for the hemoglobin A1c (a simple lab test that shows the average amount of sugar (also called glucose) that has been in a person's blood over the last 3 months) should be around 7 or below. Mine was 14.3. My blood sugar had been at a constant level of 400 for the past several months.

I was immediately handcuffed, taken into custody and sentenced to a life of green weeds, vegetables, fruit and no bread! Gone were the days of freedom where I could eat fried pork chops, biscuits and gravy, mashed potatoes, wash it all down with a huge glass of sweet tea (with real sugar) and finish it all off with an entire chocolate cake topped with a half gallon of vanilla ice cream.

No! I even had to eat my weeds and fruit from a small plate about the size of a silver dollar. Gone was the macaroni and cheese, the cornbread and beans, the fried potatoes, the overflowing plate and the sweet, sweet tea (with real sugar).

If you need a good laxative, try Splenda. The first time I tried it I was amazed. My stomach started to make noises that sounded like a volcano was getting ready to erupt.  And talk about flatulence!  I tooted with each step I took. And these weren't quite little poots either. It sounded like thunder.  It rattled the windows.  My poor Hubby. He was so patient through it all. 

However, since I was feeling a lot better after the medication started working and my glucose levels were beginning to return to normal, I have stayed with the diet. It hasn't been easy. Sometimes I get so hungry I could eat a pile of dirt...if it was mixed with lard and sugar and shaped like a biscuit.

Oh, and I don't look extremely happy anymore. I weighed this morning and I am down to 129 pounds. I look like my rag mop once again.

Think I'll get us both dressed up, draw her a pair of big round eyes and go have our pictures taken. I'll be the one on the left with the short hair.

While divorce isn't customary in my family, it is commonplace with me.

My oldest sister stayed in her marriage until death parted them and my other sister is still waiting. (Often impatiently, I might add. Especially when he is getting on her last nerve.)

Me? I turned out to be the Wizard of Was. I have more Xs than a tic-tac-toe game. I don't often refer to them a s Xs though. I prefer to call them wasbands. I have three...well actually two of them is the same man...go figure that one out!

My mama always told me that if at first I don't succeed to try, try again (I think she read that in a book someplace) so I divorced my first wasband and then remarried him, thinking that it would work out the second time. It so-oo didn't.

So then, I moved along to a new man. I'll call him Phil, cause that's his real name. We lived together for a while and it was stormy to say the least, then we decided to get married. When I agreed to marriage, I could have instantly bitten off the end of my tongue. My Blessed Sweet Jesus, what have I done, I thought. My wedding day was like an execution. I didn't hear the wedding march. Instead, the phrase "dead man walking" kept rolling around inside my head like marbles in a tin can. I kept moving forward but I wanted to fling myself off the roof top. I would have opted out of the arrangement, but his family was there and they were so excited and I just never was one to hurt someone's feelings and cause an uproar, so I said "i do" in a wee small voice, but in my heart I was thinking,  Dog gone it!! why do I keep doing this!!!

That one lasted 9 months. And two of those months were spent throwing him out of the house. I woke up one day and realized that he was a pig. A drug addict and a pervert. (but that's another story for another time.)

After I got divorced that third time,  I swore that I was through with men. I planned to get a puppy and grow old in my own little house, with my own little life, with only my dog for company.  That lasted about two months!

I met my Isband. I call him my Isband because he IS my fourth and final and only husband.

He had been through some rough spots and he felt the same way that I did about marriage. We planned to be weekend buddies. To just remain friends and go camping and fishing together. We were both burned out on the relationship thing.  However after spending a weekend in his company and getting to know him, all I could think about was that I wanted to take him home and keep him. Kind of like that cute little teddy bear that you see in the store, all snuggly and smiling and just a joy to have around.

A week later, he moved in with me and the following month he came home from work early because of rain (he is a carpenter by trade) and asked me if I would like to go get married. I sad a loud YES!!!

We were married that afternoon in the County Court Clerk's office. He had lost his wallet a few months before and the only form of ID he had was his fishing license. We live in a small town where everyone knows everyone else by name, so the Court Clerk told him that she would accept it, but not to tell anyone...(shhhh! if you tell, I will deny that I wrote this.)

So there we were, me dressed in jeans and a tee shirt that read There's Nothing Faster Than The US Male, him still in his work clothes and I have never felt more like a bride in my life. I think I said "I do" three or four times while jumping around like one of those women who win a prize on The Price Is Right.

That was eight years ago and it has been uphill ever since. If there is such a thing as a perfect husband, he is it.  He is my best friend, my companion, my soul mate and my other half.  This really is a 'till death do we part' marriage and I hope that when the time comes, I am the first to go. I can't imagine life without him.

I was raised up to be a good Southern Free Will Baptist girl and I know that divorce is wrong...but God loves me and He forgave me for all those times I made mistakes. I often feel like the woman at the well, but Jesus told her to go and sin no more.  He said the same thing to me.