It is winter and in every German tree are clumps of mistletoe. I guess it's there all year round, but you can only see it after the leaves drop in winter. It grows in giant balls that are thickest at the tops of the trees.

In New York you pay five bucks for a couple of twigs, so of course I couldn't resist greenery that was more valuable than my education. One day while we were driving to a local farm stand I spotted a low-hanging ball, and I told hubby to pull over so we could get it. He jumped a small creek, crawled through a hole in a rickety fence, and waded through a muddy pasture to the tree. That night I attached a string of miniature Christmas lights and hung it on the balcony.

The next day our friend Evelyn came over to make gingerbread houses, and she said in Germany it's illegal to cut down mistletoe. I said it's a parasite that hurts its tree host, but she said it's protected like all wild plants.

"Do you know why there's more mistletoe at the tops of the trees?" she asked. "Birds eat the berries, which means there are seeds in their poop. Since they're always flying, that's where their poop usually lands."

She doesn't say why you're supposed to kiss under it. And despite her decidedly cold explanation, I still find it romantic. The next time we're walking through a forest and I see some hanging high above I still can't resist. "Hey, a bird pooped up there," I say to my husband. "Give me your face."

One night on our cruise my friend Mike got really excited about the evening's entertainment: a mentalist. He had to sit in the front row, and for some reason he'd put on a suit, which stood out among all the muumuus and flip flops. I asked him why and he said, "I had a really, really good friend, Rick, who died twenty years ago. He promised me if there was any way he could contact me, he would. And I've been waiting ever since."

I just about cried. Mike is a really sweet Southern man so this didn't surprise me, though his naivete did. "You want a medium," I said, "not a mentalist. A medium talks to the dead. A mentalist asks you to think of a number between one and a hundred, and two minutes later a chicken walks in with the number painted on its ass."

Mike was stunned. "Oh," he said. "So this guy can't talk to the dead?"

I shook my head. Mike's face fell as the realization slowly crushed him. He seriously thought he'd hear from his long-lost friend again.

There wasn't much I could, but I had to do something. "You should definitely talk to the guy, though," I said. "The skills don't seem that far apart. If he asks you to think of a number between one and a hundred, tell him, 'I will, but first do you see an older man near me whose name starts with an R or an L?"