Unguided Blog

I do not have kids, not that I know of, anyway. Yet, it is not so hard to imagine having one with a birth defect and unable to correct it because, well, because you do not have the finances required for the operation(s).

I was born in a mid-sized industrial town, years ago. Giving birth was like a lottery in those days, no ultrasound, no MR, no nothing. I think it was even before that Dr. Spock??? (was it Spock?) published his book or it was not translated to Turkish. The country was underdeveloped, it still is in many ways, the hospitals were not among your favorite places and check-ups were usually unheard of. When a new-born had a problem, not necessarily a defect, parents had to wake before dawn to take a place in hospital queue, waited for hours to get a chance that a doctor could take a look.

But I still remember those parents, though accepting the defect in good faith possibly due to their religious affiliations, their agony, their grief, the sadness on their faces: They had to go the hospital again, to a hospital, staffed with a bunch of idealists, yet under-equipped, under-financed. And I still remember them talking, talking about a doctor, a hospital, a clinic, a whatever, in a country far away. If only they could take the infant there…

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It was Lala who got me in this shopping frenzy. She gave a mouth drooling account of her feelings about watching the storm and enjoying nature’s symphony entitled “Falling Rain” (her words, not mine) in her post Like Mother, Like Son.

After reading the article, I peacefully went to bed. In summer we hardly see thunder storms, let alone tornadoes here. The temperature is hardly below 35 degrees (Celsius, do the math yourselves to convert to Fahrenheit), humidity always high. It has a peculiar kind of appeal, though. And I woke up to a day with dark clouds gathering and a medium northerly wind, reminding me to take two aspirins in order to prevent the expected headache to come whenever there is a sharp drop in the temperature.

I started to prepare the breakfast, and took the plates, glasses, and the tea pot (I do it, the tea I mean, very well by the way) out to the garden like I often do in this time of year. Everything was alright until halfway through the breakfast. Then, a few things started to bother me. The old wooden table, chairs I repaired a hundred times, the fading color of the umbrella on the other side, the window panes crying “Paint me,” even the birds on the now old bench were singing differently. As the wind increased its intensity, so did the itch. There was only one way to stop it.

I got back inside, fired up the PC, started googling for companies offering garden furniture, patio products, etc. Found a good looking one with really good looking patio furniture and garden decor called Patio Preserve, and picked up 5000 dollar worth of their product line for my shopping cart. When I reached the payment page, I learned that they were not shipping to Turkey but only 50 states of USA, and etc, etc. While I was muttering lovely phrases of the Turkish language one after the other (language is important in swearing; imagine doing it in French and you’ll understand. Some languages are simply not fit for the job, but Turkish is) my itch was already over.

The truth is I already knew they were not shipping to Turkey. The first thing I check in on-line shopping is the shipping policy of the company, but it’s a trick I learned from my mother and improvised for the cyber world. She used to go out for shopping whenever she felt depressed or angry, although there was really, I mean really nothing to shop for. She told me “It’s the voyage, not the destination that counts.” Apparently it works!

Garden safely and naturally with the Arbico Organics!