Yotzonot

 

I was excited to move into the apartment on Yotzonot. It was in the coveted east side of Bloomington and just blocks from where my children grew up on Nicki Drive. Yotzonot comes from the Mayan word meaning place of well being or prosperity and it was certainly that for me.

The apartment had nine foot ceilings which makes a place feel much more spacious to begin with. It really only had a living room with a galley kitchen off the end of it, a bedroom and a bathroom, but the closets were big and spacious and there was an abundance of cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom. I was on the first floor of a tan brick building that had apartments built around it and back to back with a sidewalk running three fourths of the way around and a large parking lot right beside it. There was a concrete patio area in front of every apartment. I put my little blue bistro table and chairs and a blooming plant on mine.

I experimented with beds here, trying first my queen size one, then several day bed styles with mattresses that didn't work for me. I finally decided on a twin memory foam bed on a twelve inch metal frame and later bought a XL twin bed on a sixteen inch frame. Since they served as both couches and beds I put one in each room.

The kitchen was very convenient with dishwasher, stacked washer/dryer, and a very large peninsula that I could use for so many different things. 

I still volunteered at the elementary school library. I began painting with the acrylics Andy gave me for Christmas. He gave me a keyboard another year that I could play with headphones any time of the day or night. I continued writing My Thots and spent quite a bit of time with the people from Women Wine and Words. 

I also began working with miniature doll furniture with a passion here, trying out different ways of displaying it in dollhouses. I had quite a collection of antique replica furniture that was so beautiful. If I had had a house I would have decorated it like I did those dollhouses  with Victorian beds and dressers and even a tiny roll top desk. At Christmas I had a tiny tree with lights and little bitty presents wrapped underneath it.

I began my adventures with aging here. Starting out with Bromenn medical and ending up with Bloomington Primary Care, who I thought were very good and easily accessed. I have type two diabetes and stage four kidney disease so I also had to have a kidney doctor. Mine was Dr. Sultan, a tall very distinguished looking young Indian doctor who was easy to talk to. I liked him.

Becky was dating Bryan and they, along with his son, helped me move in. Bryan played men's baseball and he also played in several old fashioned and old tyme baseball leagues that I enjoyed watching with Becky when he played in town. I was sad to see Becky and Bryan move, but happy that they would have better futures in the Phoenix area. Becky had lived in Bloomington all her life so it was a big step to move so far away into such a large city, but I was proud of the way she dealt with it and it has worked out great for them.

Bobby came and stayed with me when his class had their reunion and that was fun too. He played his guitar and sang for me. We went around to all the places where we lived while he was growing up and visited Miller Park where his friend, Joel, has a huge art piece on display.

I began having Christmas dinners with Brooke and Tiffany and Tyler which was fun too. 

I was able to get all the vaccines for Covid and survived that, but that was the end of volunteering in the school library. Schools were closed for a while and even after they opened we couldn't allow them to share books. I mostly stayed in my apartment during the quarantine.  Becky would come over and we would sit on the patio ten feet apart and talk, or a couple of times we took picnics to Fairview Park and ate at different ends of one of the picnic tables.

My life here was busy and settled and then I made a comment on Facebook on a page claiming to be Simon Baker, an actor I am very fond of. At first it was just casual back and forth stuff like you might expect from an actor being nice to a fan. Later we began to talk about more things and he asked if I wanted to switch to Telegram which would be more private. I guess I should have known better and Bobby tried to warn me, but this is when things started to go wrong.

I mean they didn't feel wrong. They felt very right! He would text me in Australian time at night and little by little our conversations became more personal. We talked about our families and his work and sometimes his life. It seemed genuine and I truly enjoyed it. When it started to become more personal I got leery and blocked him, but I missed him so much. I became ill and my doctor couldn't figure out what was wrong. We did blood tests, and ekgs. We even did a cat scan. Finally it dawned on me that I was just heart sick and missing his conversations so much, so I reconnected. When that first happened he video called me out of the blue and I could see him, but the sound kept cutting out  and it was a garbled mess. Yet I really believed I had talked to him. 

Finally he began saying that since his divorce was final we should get together and that he was coming to the states and we should meet. We set a date. That day I had a manicure and pedicure in anticipation. I bought a lovely outfit and waited for his to come get me, but that never happened. Hours later he texted that they had arrived in Los Angeles and his assistant had been picked up by immigration for some kind of passport violation. He claimed he was trying to work things out, but his money was tied up because it was in Australia. Again I should have known better. Simon Baker basically raised his children here in the US, but I ended up sending this person money and that was the start of all kinds of promises and plans that cost me a fortune. He sent me beautiful flowers and a cute teddy bear. He sent me candy and pictures of the house we would live in when he finally got things situated. He made plans for us  to spend the weekend together at a nearby place that he claimed had to be kept secret because of security concerns. We had "our" song, which was Ed Sheeran's Perfect. There was always something wonderful coming up and lots of loving words and promises, but something always happened. By the time I came to my senses I had given him my entire 401k! My bank dropped my account of twenty five years when I began depositing such large amounts in my checking account and then withdrawing them. Of course I had a certified check for over two hundred thousand dollars we were going to deposit the moment his plane landed here, but  when my new bank checked it out, it was worthless! I had been scammed. 

It was the most glorious five months of my life followed by a broken heart because I had really believed we were in love. I was in love, but with an idea not the real man and now I had no money for emergencies and no longer got dividends from my money every month to live on. When my bank dropped me they gave me a check for twenty five hundred dollars that closed my account and wouldn't let me cash it at their bank! I went to another bank who accepted the check, but wouldn't let me touch it for three weeks. My direct deposit bills began bouncing even though I had the money. It was a mess!

I didn't even have enough money to open an account somewhere else until my sister loaned me $150 so I could go to Morton Hometown Clock Tower Bank. They were the ones who really helped me. They made copies of all the money I had wired or Bitcoin interactions I had made and helped me go to the police to file a report. I even filed with the FBI online and talked to the Illinois Department that handles scams. The truth was I would never see that money again.

I did actually text with the real Simon Baker and he put a paragraph on his Instagram account warning people about people using his name to get money. He said he would never ask anyone for money for any reason. He didn't need to. He asked his people to see if they could help me, but in the end they couldn't either. We texted a few more times politely and that was the end. 

Without my extra money every month and with my rent going up I knew I could not stay in this apartment. My daughter suggested I go back to work. I looked around for jobs that I thought I could do. I was walking five miles a day and I was at my lowest weight in forty years, but I was still almost 74 years old. I probably would never have tried going back to work, but there was an opening at Katie's Kids Learning Center and their philosophy was basically the same as mine. I applied and got the job as a part time teacher's assistant. It was perfect! The kids ate two meals a day there and it was all real food that was carefully chosen from reputable places and cooked on site. They used real plates and glasses and silverware and ate at small round tables of about five with an adult at each table. The ratio of adults to kid was four or less per teacher when I started and could not go over 18 children with 4 adults in our room. They had a fantastic play yard with climbing equipment, swings and even a porch swing for the 3-5 year olds and another one geared for infants and toddlers next to it. Behind this playground was a pond with geese and swans!  Inside, our rooms had a trampoline, a cozy couch thinking and reading corner, a floor area for movement or building with different kinds of blocks, or any open play actually, and tables for puzzles, coloring, drawing, whatever else there was. The children were encouraged to follow their interests and we supported them. We had two bathrooms with Dutch doors so the children were always visible to us and the staff was amazing. In my room there was me, a fourth year elementary education major, a two year early childhood teacher and a fully accredited and experienced full time teacher at all times.

The only problem for me turned out to be my difficulty getting up and down off the floor. I could sit in the tiny chairs and hold three children on my lap or next to me on the couch and help set the tables at mealtime, or clear them, but it turned out to be really hard on my back. Then one of our students caught Covid and we didn't know he was sick until nap time. Two days later I came down with Covid on Christmas Eve in spite of all the vaccines.

For weeks all I could do was move from my bed to my chair and blow my nose. I was very very sick and because of my kidneys I could not take the medicine that was supposed to make it easier. I missed weeks of work and ultimately had to quit. 

Now I was right back where I had started nine months ago. My rent would go up in July. Significantly. I was weak, fragile and at a loss. 

My sister and her daughter-in-law, Lakeisha, found an apartment building in Taylorville, near where they lived. It was for people over 52 with limited incomes. Basically you paid a portion of your total income to live there. I applied and got my name on the waiting list. The problem was money. I couldn't pay their rent and down payment while still paying rent in Bloomington, so the dates had to connect just right. And they did!

That along with a very generous check from my friends, John and Connie, made it possible for me to move one more time. I had lived on Yotzonot for seven years, the longest times I have ever lived anywhere except Nicki Drive. Moving was a necessity, but it was hard. I had to give up everything I loved in Bloomington-Normal after living there for nearly fifty years. The things I miss the most are my Women Wine and Word friends, our coffees, our games, and our walks. I also miss the good places to eat out in that area, but there is a reason for every move.

Ironwood

 

I moved into an efficiency apartment at Ironwood Apartments without much fanfare at all. It was a simple move because I disposed of anything I didn't think I'd need there. I hadn't painted with my oil paints in a long time, so I got rid of them along with my microwave that had the spider living between the two panels of the glass door (some people felt this was a boon, because as long as he lived I knew the microwave wasn't leaking,) and I left my old vacuum sweeper and mops, as well as my clothes basket for future renters that I assumed would be students. My old landlord was pleased and he should have been. I left that place much better than it was when I moved in.

This new apartment was one long room with a very nice kitchen on the end where the front door was. I had a dishwasher, microwave, stove and kitchen peninsula. There was a closet with a stacked washer and dryer right next to a large bathroom with room to spare. The rest of the apartment was where I could put my queen size bed and desk along with any chairs or other small tables. There was a good sized closet with mirrored doors that made the room feel even bigger than it was and a door to the balcony out back. There was only one large window facing the balcony, but I got plenty of light in spite of the fact that I was facing north. I discovered facing north had a lot of advantages because I got light without direct sun in the summer months. My balcony faced the backyard of the neighboring Casey's so all I saw were bushes, grass and one beautiful tulip tree. I hung three baskets of big ferns across the top of the balcony and put some patio furniture out there. It was perfect. Over the four years I lived here I watched thunder storms, snow drifts and ducks who sometimes built their nests nearby. One year a pair of ducks built their nest on my balcony! I also had a bird  feeder here and it was as much fun to watch the squirrels figure out how to access it as the birds who came to eat.

I was still helping Andy work on his Agee book. We took a trip to Knoxville so we could do research work in the University archives and while we were there my son, Bobby, and his son, Lennon, came to visit us. It was the first time they and Andy met each other and it was a fit! We went swimming and bowling and out to eat and in between Bobby and I visited while Lennon and Andy played! That night Lennon's godfather joined us for dinner.

At home I was now using two computers, my laptop and my desk top to work on transcribing the Agee work. Later I transcribed an interview Andy did with Randall Keenan and helped edit that book. It was such an honor to listen to them talk! I made several trips to Louisiana to visit him and it was always as much fun as work. We played tennis and walked Maddie, his dog, and I visited his classroom. Sometimes we went to Chucky Cheese or simply put Legos together. Then he began looking for a job in another university and I got to help do some research on that. We became best friends, always there for one another no matter what. When he got the job at the University of Alabama, I visited first in his apartment and later at his house. One day when I was there it snowed and got icy. People weren't used to ice on the roads and they were sliding everywhere. The roads turned into giant parking lots and everything closed down. We were lucky. We could bundle up and walk to the grocery store so for us it was just more time to play and have fun. When Andy and Jeff got married my daughter, Becky, and I drove down for the wedding. It was one of the first gay marriages in that area and took place in the former governor's mansion, but the night before Becky and I joined his family for a buffet at the park near his and Jeff's home.

One time we went to Austin to do research at the Ransom Center. I had to qualify as a researcher and it made me feel so important! I used gloves and book holders to turn pages and take photos of the material we needed. While there we stayed in a two story house in a private community with a pool nearby and bicycles we could ride in the garage and an awesome children's museum nearby. Austin's food trucks amazed me. I had an amazing donut with maple icing and bacon on it and a taco made with runny fried eggs. I tried my first frozen banana and went to a place that sold icies that tasted like pumpkin pie! We bought gorgeous cupcakes with names like the Marilyn Monroe or wedding cake and split them between us. One of my favorite places to eat was the Salty Sow where we ordered a whole bunch of appetizers. Another restaurant that was more Italian had an upstairs balcony where we ate under a huge tree. There wasn't anything I didn't love about Austin. While we were there we visited a small town nearby where Andy and Jeff had lived one summer. It had a big old country barbecue place with wooden floors, ceiling fans and a very back country cowboy feel. We also went to an ice cream store where they made the ice cream on site. And another day we went to a place that had giant donuts. To say I ate a lot there would be an understatement.

Andy's grandmother died shortly before his wedding and I had sent the family a big hydrangea plant. They set that out in the foyer of the governor's mansion during the wedding and his mother gave me one of the dolls his grandmother had made herself. I named her Pearl after Pearline. Becky and I sat at the table with his mentor for the brunch and I enjoyed meeting this woman who had had such an influence on Andy's life. Later his dad bought us champagne and we had our choice of a grooms cake, wedding cake and beautiful cupcakes that looked like blooming flowers. They gave everyone little tins with blue and white m&ms in them and the date of the wedding. Later on we ended up driving all the way home, I ate all the m&ms but we had a wonderful time.

During this time I stopped volunteering at the Aviation museum, but kept up my work at Cedar Ridge Elementary school. I also stopped riding my bike because if I didn't want to park it in my condo, I had to park it outside and it was going to get rusty. I gave it to my granddaughter to use in Milwaukee. I did a lot of walking here, though. The Constitution Trail was not far off and I could walk into town or out into the country depending on my mood. I could also walk around the Ironwood complex, or through the neighboring park and community gardens.

I used to hit tennis balls against the back board at Miller Park and I tried it at Ironwood park, but it wasn't as satisfying. Their tennis courts were set up more for pickleball.

We had a swimming pool and a large pond surrounded by lots of trees and geese at Ironwood. The geese scared some people, but I discovered if I pretended to be a bigger goose, stuck my neck out and flapped my arms, they left me alone. Other people reported goose attacks where they got nipped. I never experienced that.

It was during one of these walks that I met Cheri, a large blonde woman who often wore a long brightly colored mu mu. She liked to walk her dog, Lucy and stopped me one day to introduce herself. Later she introduced me to Mary who also had a little dog. Mary's daughter owned an island and in the winter she and her dog would fly out there and stay until spring. Cheri knew lots of people. Some were people she went to school with back in Streator, Illinois, but all of them loved to lunch! We called ourselves the Ironwood Ladies and spent many lovely afternoons and evenings at tea houses, cafes, and restaurants.

I met many people while living here. One who whose son had been senselessly and brutally murdered by a gang! She was trying to start her life over without him by starting her own coffee shop in Morton, but she also walked dogs for the Humane Society eventually adopting one. When she was out of town for extended periods I took care of her plants for her. I just placed them in among my plants and they did very well. 

I often ran into another woman while walking. She was from South Africa and loved to try speaking French with me. I was not very good at all, but we had fun laughing about it.

And because I had a shirt that said Michigan English that Andy bought me on a trip to the university there, people were always yelling, "Go Michigan!" The first couple of times I didn't understand why, but I figured it out. Duh!

Another time I heard a woman yelling in the apartment across the hall, then she began beating on my door asking for help! I opened the door and she rushed in followed by a man who was begging her not to call the police! She asked for my phone and, in shock, I handed it to her. They ran all the way through my apartment and  fell on my bed wrestling with each other to get my phone! I had forgotten it was password protected so eventually they gave it to me and left. He kept saying she shouldn't call the police that she was over reacting, but she ran out of my apartment calling back, "Please! Call the police!" I was so scared I locked myself in my apartment and then moved to my bathroom in case one of them had a gun. I wanted as many walls between us as possible. I dialed 911 and they answered. I told the emergency people what was going on and that I needed the police. They said they couldn't find my address! Now this apartment complex is well known in Normal, Illinois and it was on a main street. I couldn't understand how they couldn't find it. It turned out I had forgotten I have a North Carolina phone number! We sorted it out. They transferred me to Normal and about twenty minutes later the police knocked on my door. By this time the couple across the hall were no longer shouting, but I just told the police what had occurred and they took care of it from there. I guess the boyfriend had been living with her and when they had an argument she told him to leave. When he didn't, she over reacted and the fracas began. I never saw him again and she was gone within the month. Ironwood didn't appreciate that sort of renter.

I learned a lot from this encounter. Mainly never open the door when someone is beating on it and screaming, and  remember my phone is connected to a Canton, North Carolina emergency number.

I bought a big round wooden table with legs that folded up when it was not in use and had many birthday and Christmas celebrations here with my daughter and granddaughters. This was an apartment that fit me perfectly.

I decided I would like to have a cat. I went out into the country where they kept dogs and cats that were strays and asked to see the cats. They had a room full and I tried to adopt an older one, but those were all being kept because they thought they could reunite them with their owners. They had some kittens and one was an all black one about nine months old. I picked her up and she purred like mad. I held her and she cuddled right up to me. I fell in love, but to be safe I went back every day and held her for fifteen or twenty minutes for a week, just to be sure I wasn't allergic to her. Eventually I adopted her and named her Annabelle. I put a very large litter box crate in the bathroom and a small litter box inside of it. I cleaned it easily every day and never had littler or any kind of smell in the apartment. But I had to pay a $500 pet fee just for having a cat.

Annabelle was so smart and so playful! She would fetch a little toy mouse and bring it back to me,or chase her feather on a stick and roll around. I had fun making her toys to explore and our only problem in the beginning was that she would attack me at night biting my toes through the covers so hard they bled!  Her only problem was her preference for good leather as a scratching post as opposed to all the alternatives I gave her. I finally just resigned myself to having a holey footstool and I covered the chair. I got my old doggie stroller and took her on walks through the Ironwood neighborhood. When I went to Andy's I hired my granddaughter, Tiffany, to stay with her and care for her. Tiffany said she never saw Annabelle! She was worried she was lost, but I told her as long as the food disappeared it was okay. Annabelle was there. I told her she should let the bathroom faucet drip. Annabelle loved to play with that. She also liked to play in her drinking fountain, but Tiffany still never caught sight of her. That year I folded up the back branches of my little Christmas tree and hung it on the wall so Annabelle could see it, but not climb in it.

Annabelle was probably close to a year when she started getting bald spots. The vet thought it could be fleas even though we didn't find flea dirt on her, so I treated the apartment for fleas. I still don't think fleas were ever a possibility. Annabelle's feet never touched the outdoors, but her bald spots grew and so did our vet visits. They were always over $150 and I just didn't have it. I didn't know what to do. The vet finally suggested that maybe she was allergic to me! That sounded ludicrous, but after nearly eighteen months I found her another home and her bald spots finally went away. That was the last pet I had.

While still living here I joined a Meetup group called Women Wine and Words. You had to go one time to meet some of the women so people knew you really were a woman and then you could join the group. It had a fifty person limit and I was happy to be included. The reason they were so careful was because a man had tried to join the group one time simply to meet women and he turned out to be not so great, hitting on people and annoying them. We did so many things in this group and all of them were optional and usually only attended by a handful of the club at a time. You just picked the things that appealed to you and over time developed a really close relationship with other women who enjoyed the same things. There were set meetings that happened every week like trivia, or coffee, but there were also weekend theater trips and book clubs and wine tasting parties, or game parties. If you wanted to try it you could initiate it and see if people were interested. I was the oldest woman in the group, but interestingly enough my closest friend was the youngest in her late twenties. She was an engineer from Canada and when she moved back there I really missed her. Most of the women were in their thirties and forties and most were professional women of one sort of another. My first breakfast with this group was where I met Kelly who was nursing her baby. We didn't allow children at the meetings, but he was the exception while she nursed. If he got fussy she took him home. One of my other close friends was an intern when we met and hadn't decided what her specialty would be. Today Kelly's baby is in middle school and the intern is a doctor in the quad cities.

I lived at Ironwood for nearly four years and the rent went up annually. I would not have moved otherwise. I loved the apartment and the people and the neighborhood. I enjoyed taking part in their holiday contests like pumpkin carving and other fun things, but when the rent reached over seven hundred dollars I began looking for other apartments. They had smaller efficiencies for rent there, but it would have only been a couple of years before they, too, were sky high for our area. And they were very compact.

Luckily I found a beautiful apartment near the neighborhood where my children grew up.

Chestnut

 

I found an apartment near Franklin Park, our historic district, on Chestnut. It was the main floor of an old Victorian house divided into two apartments that shared a basement washer and dryer. There were only a few steps up to the front porch or out the kitchen door and down to the driveway and basement.  I thought it was doable and I loved the high ceilings and many huge windows. There were hardwood floors everywhere except the kitchen and bath which were linoleum. The kitchen had a built in lunch counter, but room for a table and chairs as well as a big pantry. 

My bedroom had been the old dining room in the house when it was built and had a beautiful wall of windows that arched out across one wall. I took my drapes from The Arbors and had them altered to fit the front room windows for a mere pittance and I bought lovely rainbow sheers for the bedroom in shades of lavender, pink and white.

I bought an elliptical machine that took me weeks to put together because it was lacking a screw! But I eventually got it together only to discover it required so much strength that I could barely use it. I eventually set this at the curb where anything disappeared in less than an hour! It was like a magic portal for disposing of all my junk.

Here I could walk a short distance to Franklin Park where Adlai Stevenson's old house was, as well as several other old homes and mansions. They had band concerts there in the summer and walking paths throughout where I could walk and listen to books on my portable cd player. I finally listened to the Iliad and the Odyssey while walking here. I also listened to music Andy recorded for me of him playing guitar and singing. Most were cover songs, but some were his own! When he sang it made me think of Elvis Presley. His voice was very clear and beautiful with that slight southern twang that shows up in music.

My upstairs house mate, Carly, came down one evening. She was finishing her masters in speech pathology and wondered if we could share my internet. That worked for me. We got along just fine.

I thought this place was perfect. I made friends with the woman next door who had lived in her apartment for twenty years and anticipated doing the same in mine. Our landlord was best friends with my son's best friend's brother and we might have met in the same social circles so I thought there would be no problems. But he had a habit of just walking into my House mate's apartment without notice and scared her a couple of times because she was sleeping during the day. She was working nights to put herself through school. He would come to mine and borrow my tools to work on something there, but the basement never got any better. I cleaned it myself, knocking cobwebs and spiders off the ceiling and sweeping out the entire basement including the furnace room. It still had standing water most of the time and the spiders were back in days, but he always had an answer. The bathtub had a gaping hole where the overflow used to be and he always said he would fix it, but he never did. I finally used a magnet to hold a vinyl drain cover over it. Otherwise I envisioned bugs crawling up through it while I was bathing. Centipede's were a thing in this apartment.

It always looked nice. He let me use the hall closet in the foyer by the front door for my coats and my bedroom closet was big with lots of shelves, but there were a few quirks. You might not have noticed them if you didn't live there, but if I put a table in the right front corner of the living room, the front legs required a one inch block of wood to make them level with the back legs! And if I sat in my desk chair in the bedroom and leaned a little, I would roll all the way across the room to the other side!

I pretty much attributed these things to the house being so old. I continued to write My Thots and work transcribing Agee's work for Andy. I could travel down to Alabama and feel like the house was safe for a week and I had room for birthday and Christmas celebrations here with my daughter and granddaughters. It was my home! This was the house where Brooke, my granddaughter, gave me the big picture frame where I could put all the family pictures in one place.

When my son's family came to visit from Colorado I felt safe letting my grandchildren sit on the floor and one time I got to take Corra down to the park by myself. We spent the afternoon swinging and watching the squirrels. It was a dream come true.

One day I was baking cookies in the kitchen when I opened the cabinet door and the shelf holding all my glasses and mugs collapsed sending them sliding off the shelf and onto the counter top, then bouncing down to the floor and shattering everywhere! I found pieces of mugs and glasses all the way across the room and even in the living room! Some of them must have bounced off my new iphone breaking the front screen. I told my landlord, because he was the one who built those shelves. He fixed the shelf and offered me the use of his old phone, which I refused. My phone never stopped working even with that big crack, thank goodness.

There was a third person who shared our house, but she didn't have access to the front like we did. She was in a small apartment built off the back, but she did have access to the basement stairs where my back door was. She was a young woman in her early twenties who was so irresponsible. She would knock on my back door until I answered it only to ask to use my phone because she had lost or misplaced hers. Then she would show up to borrow things. She was messy and let her garbage overflow onto her porch and tended to hoard junk on it as well. She made me very uncomfortable and I was glad when she moved. 

I kept my bike chained to the side of the front steps. It really wasn't too noticeable from the sidewalk and then I could ride on days when I didn't want to walk.

One day Carly, my upstairs house mate, came down and asked me if I heard squirrels. I said no, but then she was directly under the attic and I wasn't. It turned out all the eaves fell off the east side roof after a snow and anything could get in up there. Our landlord eventually fixed it, but not for many months and long after I moved out.

Our landlord was used to renting to students and he was kind of a slum lord it turned out. He didn't do anything he didn't have to and counted on students not caring or not being able to do anything about it. Plus he had a strange way of leasing the house that made it awkward to move without violating the lease. You had to sign a lease in the Fall if you wanted to stay, but it didn't start and take effect until May. That required a lot of future planning and juggling of dates if you wanted to move.

When the attic became open to the outside and the water in the basement began to smell moldy I decided to move. I found another apartment, but trying to coordinate its availability and my landlord's lease was hard. I couldn't afford to pay rent to two places at once and place a security deposit at the same time. I tried reasoning with him, but he wouldn't even discuss it. Finally I called my son whose friend's brother was my landlord's best friend. I don't know if it was discovering my son is also an attorney or whether my landlord was ashamed to have his friends know how he did business, but he agreed that if he could re-rent my apartment I could move before the following fall.  This was a small but vital part of me being able to move.

He got another renter and I moved to Ironwood.

The Arbors

  

I moved into my new apartment at The Arbors.  It was one of those brick buildings that had steps going up or down when you entered. My apartment was ten steps up. It was on a corner of the building and looked out at trees on one side and towards the sidewalk down to the parking lot on the other. Inside was a utility/coat closet and good sized living room with a galley kitchen off the end. A bathroom with a linen closet and a decent sized bedroom. It was all I needed to start out.

In fact, at the start I bought a blow up twin bed and placed it in the living room along with a folding chair and my little television sitting on a moving box with some books in it. That was everything I owned. Little by little I bought some towels, dishes, a few pieces of cookware, silverware, and then I called my sister. She said she and one of her exes would bring my other stuff on his flat bed trailer. They did and he helped me move the mattress up to my apartment, but he dropped his end in a mud puddle along the way, so my brand new mattress was already stained! I fed them lunch and offered to buy gas, but my sister said she'd pay for that. I bought some lovely dark red lined grommet drapes and when my older son, Jim, came, he hung them for me.

Chauncey and I settled in. I could take him out of either one of the buildings two doors and he and I did a lot of walking around that part of town. I signed up with the Retired Senior Volunteer Program at the YWCA and tried out several different jobs. Reading to the preschoolers at the Y seemed like a good choice, but that kind of day care violated so many of the things I felt were important as a former nursery school teacher. I ended up stopping that shortly after I was fingerprinted and bonded and ready to go. I think I went three or four times before the choices the caretakers made for the children made it impossible for me to stay there with a clear conscience.

Then I began volunteering at the Prairie Aviation Museum out on route nine. It was a good fit for me. My job was to put the flag up when I got there, take admission from people who stopped by, answer questions, lead school groups, tours, and do birthday parties where I took everyone on a tour of the building and then outside onto the tarmac to see the planes. I learned a lot of cute stories about Charles Lindbergh and women aviators. I could tell them about the first dirigibles and the history of flight, including some information on the Wright brothers. We had a Link Trainer that was once used by pilots when they were learning to fly and outside we had all kinds of helicopters, jets, and fighter planes. They could sit in our Huey Helicopter and see how many steps it took to walk from the nose of our F-14 Tomcat to its tail. This was a fun job and I met lots of great people doing it. We had Open Cockpit days when visitors got to sit in all the airplanes and we had a smoker where we made barbecue for sandwiches. Most of our volunteers were men who had been in the armed forces, including everyone from cooks, to pilots and we had people who still flew their own planes regularly. Of course the stories they could tell were amazing. One man claimed he could make his little plane appear to fly backwards, even though that was technically impossible.

I had my own story to tell. One day I put the flag up the pole as usual, being careful not to let it touch the ground in the wind out there. I went back inside and a hour or so later got a phone call. The private airport next door wanted to know if I was okay? I couldn't imagine why, but it turns out I had hung the flag upside down, a sign that I was in distress! I quickly took care of that! At the end of the day I had to fold that flag in the correct way and put it away for the next day. Another perk of volunteering here was my old friend, Cathy Bissoondial who was first one of my children's teachers and later part of the group of teachers we camped with every summer, also volunteered here when they needed someone to do birthday parties.

There was one other woman who worked the same job I did, but usually on different days. Suzi and I were both gray haired, older women who could smile and were very well informed, but other than that we looked nothing alike. That is how I learned that all gray haired women look alike to most people. I cannot tell you how many people swore that had spoken to me about one thing or another when it was really Suzi, a woman ten years older and five inches shorter than I was!

One of the men I volunteered with turned out to be very helpful to me. He and I turned up at Gailey's Eye Clinic the same day to have our cataracts removed. Mine went off without a hitch. His lens in his eye shattered and he had an awful time. His wife volunteered in my doctor's office and when he needed a ride to the museum because he couldn't drive, I would go pick him up. When I was old enough to get social security they helped me sign up for the insurance to supplement it. I still use it and am so happy I discovered it.

I continued volunteering here, but I also began to volunteer at the library for Cedar Ridge Elementary school. At first I just checked out books while the librarian taught the classes. Later I shelved books, helped children navigate the stacks and did other miscellaneous things around the library.

Then I also began working with a kindergarten teacher there. I led some of the reading classes and helped out in her classroom whenever she needed an extra pair of hands. 

That meant I was volunteering five and sometimes six days I week.  I was busy and happy and during all this I discovered a new friend.

Andy and I both wrote stories for the same online site and he began emailing me about my stories. I got his first email October 1, 2010 and had no idea that it was the start of a brand new friendship. In many ways he and I were the same person thirty years apart!

In the beginning I had no idea who he really was, but I enjoyed our emails. Later I discovered he was an assistant professor in Nachitoches, Louisiana. He sent me my teddy bear, Bearnard, for Christmas that year and I knit a scarf for him and his tiny teddy bear, Fornia, that I'm sure they never wore in the deep south. We slowly began talking about more than our stories and I eagerly read the books he was teaching in his classes. I also read his thesis and finally one day I drove down there and spent a few days visiting with him.

Meeting Andy changed my life in so many ways. All of them good. 

These were good years. Jim and Jenny had their first child, Corra, and later Sam. One year they came for Christmas and I assumed we would go to her family's house like usual, but it turned out they didn't realize they would be coming to mine until late the night before. That year we had red beans and rice for Christmas dinner, but we also had strawberries dipped in white chocolate which were a huge hit with Corra. She was so little, but her eyes lit up and those little hands reached out as she said, "more, more more!"

I began having foot and ankle problems again. This was not something new. I'd had them to some extent all my life, but they were worse some times. Here it was a problem because I had to go and down ten steps every time Chauncey needed to go out. He seemed to sense my feelings of dread and had to go out a lot more. Eventually I had to sit down and scoot down or up the staircase then hobble in and out the door each time. Having Chauncey was turning out to be too difficult and my sister agreed to take him. She had a fenced in yard and another shih tzu, so it worked out great for all of us.

Becky and her significant other, Joel, lived near our old house on Nicki Drive and I saw them sometimes too, as well as my granddaughters, Brooke and Tiffany. I went with them and his family for the fourth of July one year and it was a lot of fun. When they were evicted they spent a few nights with me before moving in with his brother in Pawnee. Becky was working at State Farm and Joel worked maintenance at the old court house, so she drove into town everyday for work.

I needed a new air conditioner/heater for my apartment and when they put it in it didn't fit quite right. I had a bird that made a nest in it and eventually got into my apartment, creating quite a mess. Then one day I heard screams and when I walked out to my car, I found blood on the sidewalk leading to the parking lot. The next week someone in one of the distant apartment buildings was stabbed during some kind of drug interaction. Add all of this to the steps I had to climb to reach my apartment and I decided it was time to think about moving.

I wanted a place without a lot of steps and thought living in an older apartment might be fun, so I began looking in the historical district around Franklin Park. There were lots of great apartments, but some were way too expensive. Others were more student apartments and either wanted roommates, or were pretty bad, but I finally found one on Chestnut Street that was going to be vacant at just the right time. I gave The Arbors notice that I would not be renewing my lease.

Extended Stay Hotel

 

I stayed at my daughter's house for two more days while I checked out local rentals. Part of the problem was that I had no furniture, no bed and no household things like dishes, sheets, or towels, just a tiny ten inch  television and some clothes. And I had a dog! It turned out I could stay at the Extended Stay America for a reasonable amount of money if I signed on for two months. It was just like a hotel, but it had a kitchenette in the room.

I moved my clothing in on a hotel cart with my little dog, Chauncey, perched on top of my suitcase. He looked so cute sitting there, tail wagging, riding on that cart like he owned the place. My room had a queen size bed, small recliner, dresser, desk and small end table. There was a compact kitchen just as I went in the door with a microwave, refrigerator and sink. I could hook up to the hotel's internet and do my laundry downstairs. It was perfect for the moment.

Chauncey and I got in the habit of going to the park every day. We would sit under a tree and I would read or write while he pursued being a dog. In the evenings I would walk him around the back of the hotel and then we either watched television or I wrote on my computer.

After the first two months I wanted more and began apartment hunting in earnest. I liked living at the hotel with Chauncey, but it didn't seem like the right long term situation. I found an affordable apartment at a complex called, The Arbors, so I gave notice that we were moving.

Decatur, Illinois

 

I arrived at my sister's house in Decatur and after a week or so we thought we might be able to share expenses and live together. I worked out a financial plan she thought was fair and bought a bed and desk for my bedroom. Later I bought myself a recliner for her living room. 

I loved to cook and I rearranged her kitchen and began cooking for the two of us. It seemed to be working out okay. At first she seemed to feel it was her duty to come home and entertain me after work, but I really didn't want or need that.

We had always done things together when we lived close enough and that continued here. We could go out to Rock Springs, or take her grandson places. It was fun to have him come by. But her house was a revolving door for all her friends. Her second ex would come by and rummage through the house, get on her computer and go through her things. She didn't mind. Her other friend that she had played volleyball with had put in a new driveway for her and paid for some other things, so he felt like it was his home too.

He spent hours digging a hole because he thought he could solve the basement problem. He just didn't have a clue what he was doing. He kept her other house key so that if she got locked out there was a way to get back in. One day we had to drive out to his mother's house to get that key. 

The house belonged to his mother and her husband, but this guy had moved in and taken over with the idea that he was watching out for them. They hated it and he treated them very badly. I was shocked at the way he yelled at that man and said so.

That was the end of living with my sister. She worked in geriatrics at the hospital yet had no problem with him abusing his parents! We argued about this until one stormy night I'd had enough. I packed up my car, but she went to bed and refused to move her car so I could pull out of the driveway. She also refused to give me her keys so I could move it. I finally just searched until I found out where her keys were then I pulled her car out. I pulled my car out of the drive and pulled hers back in. I returned the keys to the house and left in a lightning storm after midnight.

It was such a relief.

I paused at the edge of town to decide if I should go to Eman8tions in St.Louis, or my daughter's in Bloomington. I finally decided to go to Bloomington, because I liked Bloomington and had lived there for nearly thirty two years before I began moving around. I arrived at my daughter's apartment around two in the morning.

She put me up in her living room and was very accommodating, but I knew I needed a place of my own. I wasn't sure what kind of place, so I needed to time to look around. I didn't want a house with a yard I had to take care of and I couldn't afford a big fancy apartment. I needed something that was simply adequate for me and Chauncey to live in for a while. 

I discovered Extended Stay America.

Canton, North Carolina

 

I arrived in Canton, my brother backed my Honda Accord off the trailer and my son backed the big truck down the mountain and into the driveway of my new home. My brother, two of his sons and his ex-wife helped us unload everything into a charming apartment built under my son's home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

The yard was filled with blooming bushes and trees. The woman who had rented it before me planted butterfly bushes that attracted dozens of beautiful butterflies and the Rose of Sharon bushes that lined the fence were covered in brilliant pink blooms! They were also covered in big fat bumble bees absolutely covered in pollen. As I walked in the fence they were buzzing all around me. My brother said to just say, "Go away bees!" and the sound of my voice would drive them away. He seemed to be right. I never got stung and neither did anyone else. My part of the yard was small and fenced in part way by a wire fence with apple trees and all sorts of blooming plants. Everywhere I looked I could see mountain peaks. It felt very isolated and lovely, but in truth there were houses scattered here and there down the mountain behind my yard. They were just hidden.

The apartment was spacious, but not really finished or decorated in any way. Just livable. That was okay with me. I had plans to decorate it my way. There was a large living room with a window looking out on butterfly bushes and flowers. A kitchen with a nice view of the mountains, but no refrigerator or oven. I bought a toaster oven and refrigerator and installed a pretty rustic chandelier with candle like lights. My washer and dryer fit in here, but there were no hook ups. My son said I could use their washer and dryer upstairs. The bathroom was functional and due to a fluke when it was hooked up had a hot water toilet! It took a while to notice the heat when you used it, so no one had ever switched the hook ups. There was a large bedroom in the back with a window looking towards the side yard and our neighbor's house. Clyde was an interesting neighbor. He liked to sit on his rocking chair on his porch and he shaved his beard off once a year, on Easter. Clyde used to leave me wild flowers on my gate. There was a smaller bedroom in the front with two windows. One facing the mountains in back and one with kudzu creeping in between the screen and the window that looked very exotic.

My first night alone I met my roommates. Spiders! The first one appeared beside my chair, but on the floor. With her leg span she was probably as big as my hand! I originally didn't want to step on anything that big, but I didn't want her running around, or jumping around, my house. Eventually I stepped on her and hundreds of baby spiders crawled off of her and began to scatter! She was the largest one I ever saw, but all of the spiders in this house were bigger than silver dollars and there was an unending parade of them from the corners and crevices in all the rooms. I finally bought some spider spray and sprayed all the edges of the rooms. Unfortunately I didn't really think this through, so when I sprayed the ceilings a lot of it drifted back down on me! I nearly axphyxiated myself.

Mountain towns are difficult to navigate because they don't just build around blocks. They build tunnels and bridges and winding roads to deal with the steep incline of the mountains. Riding my bike turned out to be impossible for me. Too many very steep hills no matter which way I went. Just going from my backyard up the road to my son's porch above me was so steep that in winter the ice could make it almost impossible to walk up, let alone drive up. But I ended up letting my son use my car for work much of the time, so his wife could have theirs for errands. I didn't mind. I was watching my grandson and playing with him most of that time.

My son's wife was known for her sharp tongue and sarcasm. That is what made her good at the poetry she wrote and performed locally, but it didn't make her a pleasant person to be around if she wasn't enthralled with you and it turned out she hadn't really wanted me to come out there at all. No matter how hard I tried to include her and love her and respect all her insane rules, she was never happy. Not even the freedom my babysitting gave her made her happy. She was so jealous that it made her furious if my son and I even ate lunch together in my apartment while she was gone. On holidays I was invited upstairs, but she seldom even sat down in the same room or at the table with us. She just ran in and out announcing who had responded to her Twitter account.

I wasn't allowed to drive anywhere with my grandson alone in the car with me, so no going to the library, or park, or whatever unless my son went too. And even then it often caused repercussions, I was not allowed to walk him outside of our yard either. She was a very possessive and jealous woman. At first she wasn't going to let me watch him in my own apartment, but I put my foot down there. I would watch him upstairs at night if they went out so I could put him to bed. Otherwise, I would watch him in my own home. Her comfort and convenience could overrule her neuroticism.

It was so much fun having my grandson there! I bought a little round red cherry child's table and chairs set so we could have tea parties like I had with my children. Only we would get a little shaggy dog cake from Ingles for dessert. We built all kinds of things with wooden architectural blocks.  I put together a basket of marbles and metal objects that we could make marble runs with on the refrigerator. We colored and painted, read books, cooked together and played with his power rangers and Transformers. He like to play on my piano and sing and once gave me good advice saying, "Grandma when you sing you don't use your regular voice." He had the sweetest baby voice and he could remember anything! 

Sometimes I let him play with the water in the bathroom sink and sometimes we played with his plastic bat and ball in the back yard. He was a pretty good little batter! One day his mother showed up and had to show off. She hit a home run over the fence and down the road next to it. That road wound around and around, down the mountain and it took her twenty minutes to walk all the way down before she could stop it and walk back up.

I would have been glad to help her out with some household chores, but she was furious the one time I took her clothes out of the dryer and folded them before putting mine in. I took an old wooden toy castle someone had given them and refurbished it. I painted a stone facade and plants on it and bought miniature horses, knights, and even an elf princess who looked like her for my grandson to play with. She claimed I was trying to steal him away from her by doing this! In the last few months she got in the habit of rolling her eyes and looking at her friend and shrugging as if I couldn't see her when she picked her son up after work. She complained about my piano playing even though you could only hear it vaguely in the kitchen and I never played if I thought they were in there. She was the truest most complete narcissist I have ever met. And the meanest. My son always supported her which seemed right, but she was not kind to him either. The only friends he was allowed to have had to be her friends or she made everyone miserable. Just one of the problems with this was her habit of practically living with people who were friends for a while, then suddenly finding them so horrible no one could even mention their name.

And then one day she banned my son from the house and told him if he loved me so much he could live with me and if I didn't leave she wanted a divorce. I was stunned. She and I really only saw each other when she picked up my grandson up after work by that time. The rest of the time I never went up to their house for anything except to do laundry when she wasn't home. I left the next day.

I moved down there in a moving van with a trailer and came back in my Honda sedan. I put my bicycle on the back, my dog in his carrier,and the clothes that would fit in the backseat and drove back to Illinois. There had been a landslide on the main highway and it had been closed for cleanup for months, so I took back road all through the mountains to get out.

She sold or gave away everything I owned that she didn't want, clothes, china, washer, dryer, books, almost everything except my furniture, which was very nice. The only other exceptions were my fifty some photo albums that my son kept in his rooms on the second floor. I never could understand how she could give away $1500 worth of china without blinking an eye. Money was tight for them. 

Living in this house was both a blessing because of being able to see my grandson and son and a true trial trying to make her understand I wanted to treat her like a loved member of our family. I failed at that part.

Silver Street

 

I stayed at my sister's house for a few days after St.Louis, then I rented a small house two doors down from my brother, Tom and his wife. Illinois is full of coal mines and Peabody number ten was once the world's largest coal mine. It runs under much of the area in and around Taylorville. The house I rented was probably once a marshy area, mostly inhabited by people who built functional tiny homes on crawl spaces with big yards because they outhouses in the old days. There was a small sink hole by my back stoop that was swarming with slugs. They were everywhere around that neighborhood. They crawled up the sides of houses and you had to be careful because they might be right on the door handle of your screen door. They could get in through the tiniest crack or hole, so they would show up on an inside wall, or floor once in a while too. If I opened the trap door in the second bedroom floor I would be looking down at a floor almost moving with slugs, except they don't move a lot. My landlord had a man put something under the house to get rid of them, but it only worked for a while and not very good then. I finally put the lids of jars, filled with rock salt under all the legs of my bed and sprinkled rock salt around the edges of all the rooms. 

I actually sprinkled it around the outside edge of the house too and one of my neighbors came over to ask if it was to keep away bad spirits! These same neighbors had a teenage son who eventually stole two bicycles from me, but I could not prove it. 

The neighbors across the street used to comment on how pretty the little gardens that ran around the sides of the house were. They said no one else had ever grown flowers that they could remember. I didn't bother to tell them were just select weeds I left and let grow. Then I went to Walmart and bought bunches of small pretty flowers. I cut single stalks off and placed them strategically throughout the weeds!

I bought a modern version of the old push mower and mowed the yard. It didn't cut as evenly as I might have liked, but it got the job done. This was how I met my other neighbors. Mr. Dilley was the 98 year man next door. He used to watch me out his kitchen window and sometimes invited me in for iced tea. He would tell me stories of how, as a teenager, his job in Nokomis was to go around to the street corners and write the time and name of the local movie that was showing on the sidewalk with chalk. Later he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps and sent money home to his mother. He originally lived in my house, but when his came up for sale he moved because it was slightly bigger. He paid $5000 back then! Mr. Dilley was a hoot. He used to make his own homemade hooch, but one day there was an explosion followed by a bunch more and all his work came pouring out of the cabinet he stored the jars in. It was such a mess his wife told him no more. His wife died just before I met him and his son bought him a new television. Mr. Dilley loved that tv. He told me this television was not only in color, but it got basketball games! I don't think he understood his son got him cable.

Then there was Natalie who lived across the alley from me. Natalie was a short, red haired woman of probably 80 who drove a low slung purple sports car with a convertible roof. I would look out and she would be walking around the steep roof on her garage cleaning gutters, or pulling a wagon load of trash out to the alley. Natalie was independence plus!

My brother's house was the place to gather if you were up at 6 am. A motley assortment of people would already be there smoking cigarettes and drinking pot after pot of coffee. Tom was disabled from a rather wild and free life that ended when he attempted to move a five hundred pound stove by himself. He had a wife and two step daughters who lived with him along with two little dachshunds called, Sadie and Sophie. His best friend left him a farm where he could go and be alone if he wanted to and he loved that place. One day I drove out to see him and there was a large bird eating a rabbit in the middle of the drive. As I got closer, the bird rose up and flew directly over my windshield. It was so big its wings completely blocked my view! Tom said it was a golden eagle that had been hanging out there for a week or so. Animals loved him He could walk right up to most wild animals for some reason. They seemed to sense that he was safe. I used to go with him to feed the geese at SangChris Park. As his little blue car pulled into the lake area, the geese rose up and flew behind the car until it stopped. Then we got out and fed them. They knew who it was! He took me to a town on the Mississippi river to see the bald eagles two different years. They go there in February because with the dam the water isn't frozen and they can fish. It is amazing to watch one fly over the water, dip down and come up with a fish in its talons. It is also amazing to see that many bald eagles in one place. The trees are literally alive with them. The second year there were fewer bald eagles, but tons of pelicans.  When Tom died his daughter had one of the most meaningful funerals I've ever been to. We met at his favorite fishing spot where a little bird chose to fly in and sit on the cooler beside his children while his daughter spoke and read the twenty third psalm. Then we all drove out to the farm where everyone participated in sharing his ashes over the ground he loved so much. I have a photo of his four children throwing his ashes up to start everyone off. Each one has a cloud of their father's ashes hovering over them. It felt both significant and heart rending to me.

Years ago I would put Ninna, my first dog, in a basket on the front of my bike and I could ride anywhere. She never tried to jump out and she loved the wind in her face. Here I tried to teach my new puppy, Chauncey, a shih tzu,  to do the same. In the beginning I put a harness on him and hooked it to the basket. I'd never done that with Ninna, but I was being extra careful. He seemed to be really comfortable so I got a little less worried over time and would just stuff the leash in the basket with him. That worked great. Until it didn't. One Sunday afternoon as we approached a corner, some jogger ran past and Chauncey threw himself out of the basket. It caught me completely off guard and his leash caught in the wheel so that I ended up riding my bike right over him. I will never forget his scream! I thought I had killed him. Someone put my bike in his truck and drove us back to my house where I called the vet at home and she met me at the office. I will never understand how, but he seemed totally unscathed. She said he might be a little sore but he never even acted like that. However, he was now afraid of all bumps in the road, whether on a bike or in a car and he never really got over it. We gave up bike riding and I bought him a screened in cube type doggie seat to ride in in the car. It hooked with a seat belt and was high enough that he could look out the window. It took a long time, but he eventually got used to that, because I took him everywhere. I would put him in his bag that was disguised as a purse, by asking, "Want to go bye bye?" He'd leap in and wait for me to zip it. Or I was push him in a doggie stroller and just throw a baby blanket over the screen when we went into restaurants or stores. He never barked and people just assumed it was a child.

Before I got Chauncey I tried adopting a five week old mixed breed Australian cattle dog. Someone had dumped the whole litter at the pound. He had the bluest eyes and he was the smartest puppy I've ever met. I took him out once and he was housebroken. I threw a tiny ball and he instantly knew to retrieve it, but he had a nasty growl when I tried to pick him up and bring him in if he didn't want to come in and he was snappy about anything that didn't go just his way. My brother's wife, Cheryl, teased me about this a lot. "Awwww, did the whittle bitty puppy scare winda?" One day when she said that she picked him up and he bit right through her lip! He was barely six weeks old, but I realized I was out of my depth here. I found him a new home with a farmer on a big farm. I saw him many times after that and he seemed totally happy. He was always totally engrossed in whatever that man was doing. I asked him how hard it had been to train him and he said, "Oh I just slapped the ____ out of him a couple times and he stopped biting right away!" I could never have done that. It just wasn't my style, but there was no denying how happy that dog was, on the farm, in town, in a truck, off leash, he was perfect.

My sister would come over from her house and we would take Chauncey on a leash and my cat, Nijinkski, in the stroller, for walks around that neighborhood. She and I also use to ride bicycles on the trail out towards Pana, Illinois. It was made from the old railroad tracks and ran alongside the highway. One time there was a big snake lying right in the middle of the trail and instead of just letting us both ride around it, she grabbed my bicycle in a panic, knocking me off almost on the thing! I was so angry. Another time I was riding alone out there just before dusk and a big old coyote came out and stood in the middle of the trail staring at me. I immediately turned my bike around and went the other way.

One night I woke up because my bed was shaking! Then the whole house shook and my first thought was oh my God we are going to fall into one of the coal mines! Growing up I had seen semis that had fallen through the streets like that in Springfield, but this turned out to be a real earthquake! One of the rarest things we ever experienced in prairie country. By the time I thought to get up and stand under the door frame, it was all over.

I lived here about three years, alternately seeing Eman8tions and thinking that we were not really good for each other when my youngest son offered to let me come back out to North Carolina and live in the mother-in-law apartment below their house. My nephews loaded all my furniture, including the piano, into a moving van. We put my Honda on a trailer to be towed behind it and one of my brother's ex-wives drove her car with me and one of my nephews behind this while my brother and his youngest son drove the truck. We were on our way to North Carolina.

It was not a perfect solution, but it seemed like the thing to do.

St.Louis

 

Eman8tions lived in a typical St.Louis Tudor four-square apartment building. His apartment was on the lower right with a spacious living room, huge middle bedroom and large kitchen. It had a front porch and back porch and access to the basement. I had given him my old stacked washer and dryer when I lived in the condo on Linden and he put that down in the basement.

When I arrived his apartment was filled with boxes. He had never bothered to unpack them because he really didn't know what to do with much of it. I sorted through everything and moved much of it to shelving in the basement. He eventually turned the room with the washer/dryer into his workroom where he made his drums and other projects. I stored my bicycle down there.

We were barely a block from Tower Grove Park, a lovely old St.Louis fixture with a pond and leftover Victorian ruins. The Botannical gardens were just a few blocks the other way and the house my grandparents lived in when my dad was born was right next to the gardens! I loved this neighborhood and rode my bike all through it. It was close to Grand and not far from The Hill, an Italian neighborhood where you could get yummy cannolis. There was a wonderful Irish pub called O'Connels with an antique store above it that had fish and chips on Fridays and the best hamburgers you could buy. We used to go Kaldi's coffee house in La Due and find lovely places to eat in the Central West End. We spent many wonderful hours at The Living Insights Center where Eman8tions played his flute and led meditations. I bought my beautiful Quan Yin statuette there and she still sits in my living room.

We did so many things together while I lived there. He gave concerts at different churches and locations all over the St.Louis area and even other towns and I always sold his CDs and books afterwards. We took a trip house sitting in Sedona, Arizona and made a side trip to the Grand Canyon. We camped in Chaco canyon and walked through Anasazi ruins. I remember the road into the campgrounds was so bumpy we had to crawl over it while tiny mice scampered across the moonlight ruts. I'll never forget how the wind blew threw the cliffs there, sounding like flutes from some far off past and the giant ravens who squawked over our tent that first night when we barely got inside before a huge thunder storm hit. We also traveled to pow wows to sell his drums and books and helped make labyrinths for people who wanted them.

One time we went to visit one of his friends from the symphony. The guy was a percussionist. He invited us in and we all got acquainted without much more talking. He had one of us gently tapping on a big gong while the other played a drum. He and his wife joined in too. Afterwards she read us some of her Haiku poetry and then we went outside and rode the electric train he had made. You could sit on the flat cars, or lie on two of them and feel like an alligator riding around his yard! It was so much fun. Both of us could ride at the same time. It was a very long small train on a winding track.

He was a huge proponent of AA and loved to tell his story. One of the women who was influential in his life was dying and her children rented an apartment for us so we could stay with her and take care of her. At first we cooked and took her to see things like The Gaither Family concert. Later we sat with her as her friends stopped by to visit and tell us how she influenced them. I remember how the people from a group of Children of Alcoholics would come one night a week and bring Chinese food to share. She was a much loved woman. I began knitting a multi-colored scarf and once in a while, when someone came to give us a few hours off, they would knit on that scarf. I gave it to her daughter after she died. At the end I was the one who gave her the drops of morphine to ease her pain. I watched her carefully, counting her breaths, because that was they told us we would know if she was in pain. After a while her breathing continued to get more rapid and I eventually gave her the extra drop of morphine. She died. Not alone, but with me right there and with no obvious reaction except a sudden peacefulness. Weeks later we drove to Springfield, Missouri to a memorial for her and both of us spoke. I did not intend to speak, but somehow found myself up there trying to explain how she'd felt like our great gray-haired child in the end. I never realized it at the time; I was too nervous when I sat down, but they gave me a standing ovation.

We also visited his friends like Jack who lived out west of St.Louis. Eman8tions mowed a labyrinth through one of his overgrown fields for him. This was where he and I attended a sweat lodge. It was much different from the one I had done in Illinois. In Illinois we didn't wear clothes and we jumped in a freezing creek afterwards. Here I had to wear a long sleeveless dress so no one would be offended and I declined to jump in the green stagnant pond. But the rocks were the same, so hot they glowed from the inside.

Another time we drove out west of St.Louis to see the elk and buffalo. It was a park divided into two sections to keep them separated by cattle guards. The elk were so close we could hear their antlers clicking as two big males began to fight. When we drove through the buffalo section we got so close to some of the buffaloes that one charged at our car! For a moment I thought we were in really big trouble. I envisioned those gigantic horns piercing my hood or even my windshield, but at the last moment he veered off.

I loved this period in my life except for the other women. Eman8tions had a powerful need to experiment with different women and lifestyles that led to me leaving several times. Once I went all the way to North Carolina to stay with my son. I got a job up on Black Mountain working in a cute little tourist spot. The owners were friends of my son and hired me to sell ice cream, hot dogs and retro type sodas at a place called Dukes. It was fun and something I'd never done before. When I first started there the owner showed me how to use bear spray if I ever needed to protect myself from someone if I was alone. He also showed me how to set up the big umbrellas they put out in pre-drilled holes in the boulders surrounding Duke's. They were not allowed to have picnic tables because they did not have a public restroom. The rocks became a shady place to sit if someone wanted to eat there. We put them out every morning and took them in at night. Then the owner, who also ran White Dog Press, asked me to come work in his printing office. He had two immense Alsatian German Shepherds. They were his children and went everywhere with him and his wife. They had their own air conditioned trailer to travel in, but they were guard dogs. I could not go from the back of the shop to the front without calling out to Will who would then inform the dogs it was okay! It was scary for someone who was already leery of dogs. During this same period I helped my son and his wife move into their first house in Canton, NC and made plans to stay out there when Ema8tions called. Somehow I thought I asked me to marry him, so I packed up and went back to St.Louis. He said I misunderstood. 

I don't count my time in North Carolina as a legitimate move since it didn't last very long and I just stayed with my son and his wife. It was more like an extended vacation. Being back with Eman8tions didn't really work for either of us. I finally ended up moving back to Taylorville, but we remained very good friends.

Nokomis

 

The house I called the Nokomis house was actually in the middle of nowhere. It was about twenty miles to the nearest town and if I wanted to go to the show it meant a seventy mile round trip. The house had been built by this farmer's parents when they were young and it was probably just a cabin type home to begin with. The kitchen and living room were slightly separated by a large wide double opening and a very narrow bedroom ran along side them. The bedroom had no closets, just two boards, one on each end with four clothes hooks on each, which I assumed were his and hers!. There were two doors, one at each end of the bedroom leading into the living room or the kitchen. I had to use the door on the side of the bed I got out of, because there was no room to walk around it. 

It looked they had added a bathroom and an enclosed staircase to two bedrooms upstairs later on. Each bedroom had a bare bulb hanging in the center of the room, connected to a string they strung over to the door so I could pull it and turn the light on as I went in.

There was an enclosed porch attached to the kitchen and behind that a concrete foyer that had two doors. One went to a new double garage and the other out the side of the house. I looked upon this as my guarantee no snakes would get past all this into the house, because there were snakes everywhere! I didn't know this until I began mowing the yard or I might not have moved in. The house actually looked nice. It was just uniquely old fashioned.

The bath tub was so filthy when I moved in that it took me three days of soaking and scrubbing to clean it before I considered it usable, but they were heavy good quality fixtures. There was no stove, but I had a microwave and I bought an electric stove second hand from Goodwill in Springfield, nearly fifty miles away. There was a dishwasher, but even after it was repaired it only worked twice before failing to drain again. There was a pile of junk in the upstairs bedroom. I hauled most of it out to a concrete burn pad in the back yard, but I found a door with seven glass panels that fit between the kitchen and glassed in porch. That worked great for my cat, Midnight. He could use that missing pane as a door to get in and out to his litter box.

However Midnight disappeared the day after he moved in. I looked everywhere for that cat and only the fact that his food was disappearing kept me convinced he still lived there. He was a very large, long haired black cat who probably weighed fifteen pounds. I began to think he was like the Cheshire cat and could make himself invisible, but it turned out he'd taken up residence inside the rolled up carpet in the closet. After a couple of weeks he came out.

Eman8tions came up from St.Louis and we planted a 75 foot diameter sunflower labyrinth in the back yard. He dug the holes and I crawled along behind him planting seeds. (I still wasn't aware of the snakes.) As the weather got nicer I needed to mow the grass. First I went around and picked up about a million spent shell casings and corn cobs, then I revved up my hand mower and got to work. The first time I waited too long and the grass was so high I had to rake it up like hay and carry it by the armloads to the ditch across the street. Thank goodness the snakes did not make an appearance in my arms! Later, mowing became a full time job as the weather improved and the grass grew faster. I would start mowing early in the morning, stop for lunch and continue on until it got too hot. Once I got to the end it was time to start over and do it all again.

I wore an old sun hat, leather work gloves, and drank gallons of water, About this time I discovered the snakes. The first one I saw was a dead baby one and I felt bad, hoping I had not mowed over it and killed it. After that they would suddenly appear in a place where I had not seen them a moment before, leaving me totally freaked out. I really am afraid of snakes. They don't make any noise and you never know where to expect them.  One lived right at the end of the labyrinth, which kind of destroyed the peaceful meditation of walking it for me. It would slither away just as I approached that part every single time.

One afternoon as I was mowing, the mower locked up and I thought, oh, another corn cob, so I jostled the mower up in the air to dislodge it and a swirling, writhing snake came flying out! I felt almost sick. I had probably cut that animal and I was also quite startled by it. I didn't see any blood on it, but when I looked down at my feet I realized I was standing in a huge mass of writhing snakes! I guess they call it a mating ball. I called it my worst nightmare. To my credit I finished mowing the yard, shaking like a leaf, because I knew that was my job if I lived there, but I was hyper-vigilant after that.

I learned that one of the downsides to getting back to nature was that snakes, mice and bugs are part of nature and the farmers loved the snakes because they ate all the others. However quite a few mice escaped the snakes. I never really saw them, but my kitchen cabinets and drawers were just full of mouse turds. I could scrub them out at night and the next morning they'd be full again. I ended up putting all my dinnerware, utensils, pots and pans, etc. in large plastic cases on the counter. Leaving the cabinets to the mice. I put out some Decon once and one poor dead mouse smelled so bad I found his rotting dehydrated body on the porch, but nothing changed in the kitchen, so I stopped that. I put out live traps, but I never caught one mouse. I don't know what they ate. I kept all food in my refrigerator whether it needed to be there or not.

Then there was the living room carpet. It was very old variegated green and brown shag. Just perfect to hide the little bugs that would sometimes crawl across it.

I asked my landlady how to deal with all these things because her house appeared spotless, but then so did mine! She just said, "Grandma used to kill them black snakes with a shovel if they got up in her yard." I couldn't imagine myself doing that.

In total frustration I did pour Mop and Glow around the snake area in the labyrinth one day and my sister used to tease me that now I would have glow in the dark snakes crawling around the yard.

It was the perfect place for bird watching. I put up feeders and blue bird houses and saw all sorts of birds. There were finches of every sort, cardinals, crows and starlings of course, pheasants, and even quails. It was a bird watcher's paradise. It was not a paradise for blue birds though. They laid eggs and some of them hatched, but eventually they all flew off and I found dead babies and leftover egg shells in the houses. The farmer said the snakes probably got them.

I also had house wrens who persistently built their nests over the lights by my doors. I would knock them down immediately, before they laid any eggs and hope they would go build somewhere else. I don't think they ever got the idea.

I was miles from people and it was so quiet out there I could hear if two people were talking in a nearby field, but one day I heard what sounded like a crowd at a football game. Curious, I walked out my back door and there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Canadian geese and snowy white geese flying over my head.  Some were so low I could actually feel the wind beneath their wings! And they kept coming for a very long time, maybe twenty minutes! I've never experienced anything like that before or since and doubt if I ever will again. It was breath taking.

The geese liked to settle in the empty spaces and the farmer and his friends liked to come out with shot guns and kill them. It seemed wrong to do that. I would be riding my bicycle down an empty country road and suddenly hear blasting coming  from behind the trees. I knew they were shooting geese.

One weekend Eman8tions and I brought his granddaughters out to visit. I got out my little table and chairs and used the linen table cloth my grandmother made me, just like I did for my own children. We played dress up and had a tea party with my beautiful antique doll china. I made tiny sandwiches and bought minature Oreos, cheese balls and a tiny cake. It was so much fun. That night he built a fire in the back yard so we could roast hot dogs and make s'mores. The girls chased lightning bugs and put them in jars like children have done for hundred of years. They had never done any of these things and they were enchanted. So was I. This was part of living the dream for me.

We sat there in the dark and we could have been any pioneers on the Illinois prairie at any time in history. As the moon grew brighter the coyotes began howling and calling to each other. First on one side of us and then the on another until we were completely surrounded by what felt like hundreds of them. It was awe inspiring and a little bit scary.

During the time I wasn't mowing the grass, I was tending the sunflowers and one afternoon as I stood there with the hose, the ground shook! Now we really don't have earthquakes in this part of the country. There have only been two that I can remember in my lifetime, but the earth under my feet vibrated! I wondered if it was going to crack open and I would fall down into a crevice like I'd seen on old movies. I finally ran in the house and called my brother, Tom. The earth wasn't vibrating where he was thirty miles away. He said maybe it was moles. That was pretty scary too. Imagine moles big enough to do that!  Several days later I discovered there was a rock quarry five miles away and they had been blasting.

I got used to the total deep darkness of country nights and even found it charming when I turned on the outside lights to see deer in my yard! Of course when the light came on they ran away. Have you ever heard the sound of deer hooves on hard packed fields? It's intriguing. Of course the deer were there to eat the peonies and other flowers I planted, but I figured that was the price I paid for the experience.

I turned one end of the long downstairs bedroom into a cozy little library and wrote My Thots in there and for a while I thought I was there forever. I began trying to figure out how much heating oil to order for winter. The only unsettling thing, besides all the critters was the overwhelming smell of old lady's perfume that would occasionally envelop the house at night. I told myself it was probably the smell of her powder or soap in some cupboard that hadn't dissipated. 

By July the novelty was wearing thin. The corn near the house was getting taller and taller. It came up to the second story windows now. and the sunflowers along the edge of the labyrinth were also extremely tall, while the middle ones barely topped three feet.  That gives you some idea of how potent modern day fertilizer must be. All I could see from my house or my yard now was corn, tall, endless corn. I was living on an island inside a sea of corn. That must be what a rat feels like in a maze.

I found a ladder and climbed up to wash the second story windows on the outside. I could see the corn reflected in the glass and the sky behind it and to this day I still think I also glimpsed a woman staring back at me! I nearly fell off the ladder. I tell myself it must have been my own reflection, but the hair was wrong and so was the blouse. And yet it was only a glimpse. Maybe I confused the sky and the corn with my own self? My son Jim and his wife came to visit me and they slept in that upstairs bedroom with no problems at all.

In August Eman8tions invited me to come live with him for a while. My nephews helped me put all my things in storage and I put my piano in my sister's house. I was very careful storing everything. One of my nephews gave me wooden pallets from where he worked and I lined the floor with these. Then I put bags around to absorb moisture and repel rodents. I wrapped, or packed everything in waterproof containers. Finally I packed up my cat and my clothes and set out for St.Louis.

Ash Street

The house on Ash was nice. It was down the street from my brother's ex-wife and his son and had the oldest tree in Christian county in the front yard. It was a small wood frame house with two bedrooms connected by a long skinny closet. There was a living room, separate dining room, eat in kitchen and a laundry room off the kitchen. The bathroom was off my bedroom. There was a front porch, a small side porch, and a glassed in porch that could only be accessed from the outside. It even had a basement where I stored many things I wasn't using. That turned out to be a mistake as the basement wasn't as dry as it looked.

One of my favorite things about this house was the small high window at the end of the long closet. My sister had given me a stained glass frame that fit perfectly in this window giving the closet a wonderful rich look. I put the king size bed in my room and the queen in the guest room along with my computer. I bought a 1940's cherry chest with a hidden make up drawer for my clothes and a small table for the kitchen. Everything else I had fit in perfectly here. I even put hanging plants along one side of the dining room.

My neighbor offered to mow my grass when he mowed his for ten dollars and who could beat that. I put my bike in the garage, but not my car because I couldn't put a garage door opener on it. It opened the wrong way. 

Becky and her new Guatemalan boyfriend came for dinner here one time. Bobby and Barbie came  just before Barbie's thirtieth birthday. They brought their new puppy, Eben the second, a beautifully trained Australian cattle dog. Bobby was in the kitchen telling me about the surprise proposal party he was planning for Barbie's birthday when there was a horrific explosion! We heard Barbie scream and ran in to see what happened. She was getting up off the floor! 

Lightning had struck the tree across the street, knocking branches off of a it before jumping to my house, hitting my tree and my electrical wires. No one was hurt, but it destroyed both my computer and my phone.

This was a cute house in a quiet neighborhood in a small town, but one night as I was watching television, a man came rushing into my living room. He didn't knock or anything. Then he stopped dead and stared at me like I was trespassing. Imagine my shock, and his surprise, when he discovered his friend no longer lived there. Still I felt very safe there except for the occasional feeling that I was not alone. That didn't bother me enough to want to move.

For a while I made dinner every night and my sister would come eat with me. We went on long walks at Rock Springs Conservation area near Decatur. We loved to look for deer and one time when we got lost we saw a big white owl high up in a tree looking down on us. We also loved to just sit in their bird room. They had microphones so you could listen to the birds as you watched them eat at the feeders. I thought how lovely it would be to live out in the country and be able to experience these things all the time.

The seed was planted and the search began. I really didn't expect to find a house in my price range like that, but I talked about it with everyone I knew. Finally, my brother's wife said her sister's husband had an old family home out in the country and it was available if I wanted it.

It was time to move!

Linden

 

I was both surprised and tickled to find the condo on Linden for sale. It seemed to have a mini version of those things I loved about my house on Monterey. There was a large pond, or lake, with the condos built up around it like some kind of Swiss village. It was a two story with a balcony off the bedroom looking down at pine trees and the lake. There was a jacuzzi bath tub that was even better than our house, because it was exactly the right size for me and I could fill it up every day if I wanted to.

Downstairs there was a good sized kitchen with a dining area next to it, facing the lake. And the living room had a wood burning fireplace, a smoky mirrored wall opposite two tall windows that flanked the fireplace and a step up to the foyer. The foyer led to an open staircase with a skylight and there was a small sheltered porch directly in front of the door to my garage. It was spacious and private with two bedrooms, a large walk in closet and two large extra closets upstairs. There were two baths with the lower one having a washer and dryer instead of a tub.

The condo fee was only $60 a month, but the monthly fees in the beginning were pretty steep for me. I was working at State Farm, still part of a dream group, and had a new best friend who lived at Ironwood, which wasn't too far away. I put a garage door opener on my garage and stored my bike in there. This condo was right off the Constitution Trail so I rode daily, usually out into the country and back, but sometimes all the way across town to the grocery store, or through downtown Normal.

I joined a divorce support group that taught me a lot about what to do and not do as a recently divorced person and enjoyed this group so much that I continued to go to it for some time. The first winter was hard. I had not worked at a full time job for a long time and I had pneumonia three different times that year. We had a snowfall with so much drifting that my second story windows were halfway blocked and going from my porch to my garage was like going through a hallway of snow taller than my head. And I bought a computer!

My friends from India, who I had known since our boys were playing first year soccer together kind of took me under their wing. She offered me help with weight watchers and he put together my first computer, then showed me how to use it. Soon I added internet to my life and got my first email address so I could communicate with my friend Carol in California. Carol had grown up with my ex. Her dad was the priest at the Episcopal church by his house, but she had kept in touch with me throughout all the years of our marriage. First we used snail mail. Now we emailed and through these emails I learned to navigate the internet.

Carol was a counselor and knowing my ex as well as she did, had a lot of information for me. I actually flew out to California to see her twice and while I was there I got to visit one of My Thots subscribers, Suzanne. Suzanne was a fantastic musician, singing and playing guitar and I will never forget the first day I met her. She played and sang for me in a little garden house on a hill behind her house. Then we cut up apples from her yard to make applesauce and picked blueberries to sweeten it. She had rescued dogs and turtles and it was a magical afternoon. One of her turtles followed me up to the porch at the end of the day and I was enchanted. Carol was the person who recommended books on Narcissism and helped me to understand my crazy marriage. These vacations were the first time I learned to travel on the BART and explore San Francisco and the places near by on my own. When my son, Jim, went out there with me to buy his classical guitar we spent hours at the shop while he played them then picked a different ethnic restaurant for lunch everyday. One day we walked across town, through the park to see a school he was interested in. We ended up off the trail and came across of pond filled with turtles. There were so many turtles sunning there that they were stacked up one on top of another and as we came in they all tumbled into the water. 

I only had one scary experience during these trips and that was the night I rode the BART to hear Latif Bolat perform in Berkley. I got on a bus going the wrong direction and thought the bus driver was throwing me off because I was asking her questions. It turned out she was merely pointing me towards a bus that would take me back the way I needed to go. I went to that concert, met Latif and his wife and walked back through Berkley late at night all by myself to catch a bus to the BART and then walk back to Carol's house. It was quite a night.

Jim got really sick that year. He had tonsillitis and the doctor said they had to come out. We decided he would stay with me during this time and all might have been okay except for the weekend before surgery. He must have gotten into some poison ivy while camping out. It wasn't really noticeable, but the nurse did see it just before they put him out. He just had a patch on his wrist that they decided to put a bandage over and ignore. Unfortunately during his early recovery he must have scratched it and spread it over large parts of his body. The medicine they gave him for pain for his tonsils helped some, but the itching was intense. He spent nearly ten days at my apartment suffering. I gave him my big king size bed so Jenny could stay with him and help him while I was at work. We made jello and soup and did whatever we could but he was miserable.

My first email was with Juno and later AOL. Carol sent me emails by someone who wrote as Eman8tions. I loved reading them and thought it was really just her pen name at the time. I also began talking to people through messaging and enjoyed the anonymous flirting and discussing of so many things. Once in a blue moon I actually went out for coffee or a drink with some of these people; like I did with the guy who loved Hildegard Von Bingen. We met in the lobby of his hotel, both of us carrying our Rumi by Coleman Barks books to recognize each other. None of these meetings amounted to anything, but I loved hearing, "You've got mail!"

One day I did not get an Eman8tion and I was so disappointed that I decided to write back. That was the beginning of My Thots and a new relationship that has lasted to this day. He turned out not to be my friend Carol, but instead a man who was based in St. Louis and a former symphony conductor.

Then I met Pan. Pan and I started out on instant messaging, pretending we were Wendy and Peter having adventures in Neverland. We were two night owls who just had fun connecting online until one night he asked to meet me at Denny's for coffee. Imagine my shock when I walked into Denny's after midnight and met a six foot three, blonde haired, blue eyed, twenty two year old! He didn't seem put off and we talked for hours. Then we went to Miller Park to watch the sun rise. As we walked under the trees he would spontaneously twirl me around like we were dancing, or hold my hand and just start running. It was magical and so sweet. When he said goodbye, as we ran for our cars he raised his hand and called out, "Remember! Second star to the right and straight on to morning." Pan and I saw each other for several months, but his mother's name was the same as mine. She was also my age and he was so much younger, I began to feel a little awkward. Then Eman8tions, who I had started writing to, and actually met, acted jealous and I decided to end it. Pan cried. I was sad too.

Eman8tions was a man seven years older than me who wrote meditations and poetry and played Native American flute. He was hobnobbing around the country visiting the subscribers to his thoughts and finally ended up back in St.Louis living with one of his best friends, a woman and her husband. He was her maid of honor at her wedding. The first time I drove to St.Louis we went to a kite festival at Forest Park. The second time was mother's day and I took my two adult son's with me to meet him at the Butterfly House in Chesterfield. He had another woman with him and I ended up taking us all out for Chinese food after he finished performing. I was already hooked, but so were a lot of other women. Including the woman he was with that day. That was the beginning of a long relationship where I learned things and did things I never expected to be part of. Wherever he performed there would be women madly in love with this sparkling eyed, modern day guru who spoke with such heartfelt words. He also filled in for some religious places when their ministers were out of town and I often went with him. He spoke to the Science of Mind people in Milwaukee and quite often at the local Unitarian church. He officiated at a Wiccan wedding and several other places. We explored different philosophies like the Vedanta Society and a sweat lodge. He made Native American drums and I helped, then we sold them at pow wows or just to people who wanted them. I had birthed my own drum many years ago on a small farm outside Blue Mound, Illinois. That was a very ritualistic and meaningful experience, but working with him was also meaningful in a different way. 

One time we were invited to a psychic fair in Atlanta and drove all the way down there to put on his concert and attend their fancy masked costume ball, but the person in charge evidently did not do enough advertising and they lost money on it. They still paid us with a big check, which promptly bounced when we tried to deposit it. We never did get our money for that, but I did get to meet his mother on the way home. And we also stopped at Bobby's house in North Carolina on that same trip home. We arrived around midnight, put on our costumes for the masked ball and knocked on his door. When Bobby opened it he was greeted by a very large bumble bee complete with antennae and gossamer wings and an angel with real feathered wings! 

We were very active politically, going door to door to make sure people got out to vote and even giving rides to the polls. I remember we ate breakfast with Dennis Kucinich and I used my first mobile phone to make calls from his headquarters. We sat on the floor for hours going through our lists.

When he was on the road and I was alone I would build a fire in my fireplace and burn incense and practice meditating. I even made a doll that looked just like him to sit across from me. It wore a tiny navy blue jogging suit, real tennis shoes and had a brown yarn ponytail. Typical of me it was all or nothing. LOL

In the meantime I still had my dream group. I have always been a very prolific dreamer and I remember some of my dreams as if they were actual experiences. My dreams are so real it is as if I have two lives. I've always wondered if that is a throw back to my Ojibwa great great grandmother. My friend, Tom, was still a big part of my life too. Both in dream group and with my son, Bobby. Being on my own for the first time, I was clueless about things like taxes and ended up having to pay $3000 that first year. I didn't have it, but Tom loaned me the money and I paid him back little by little.

I had my piano, but I wanted to learn to play the flute, so I bought a flute and took lessons. At first I couldn't get a sound out of it! I was used to the oboe or saxophone and blowing over the flute took me a while to learn. Eman8tions was the person who finally taught me how to do that.  At the end of the year I actually played in a recital, but I didn't tell anyone about it. I was so nervous. I'd never played a recital anywhere, so just doing it was enough for me. My teacher accompanied me on one piece and a Russian conductor/pianist accompanied me on another. It was a success and I felt pretty proud. In fact I was kind of sorry I hadn't invited anyone to hear me, but there were a lot of other people there. Mostly parents whose children were learning to play instruments for the first time.

Christmas that year the boys played their guitars, I played my flute and Jim's future wife played the piano while Eman8tions sang carol's.  It was a dream come true for me to have everyone together like that.

The next year on Christmas I moved the big round dining table into the living room by the fire and put the tree up in there. It felt very old fashioned and cozy. Everyone was there, Eman8tions, my boys, Becky and my three tiny granddaughters, Brooke, Tiffany, and Alicia and we opened presents. The following day I cooked a big traditional Christmas dinner for all of us and we waited. We waited and waited, but Becky never showed up. I didn't see or hear from her again for months. It wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened, but it was still a disappointment.

Eman8tions helped me get Jim ready for the Honors program in Austria. Being a musician who had done some traveling Eman8tions helped him pack his classical guitar so it could withstand the trip, Bobby went off to work at Camp Arrowhead Boy's Camp in North Carolina for another year as a camp counselor. I heard Becky was staying at the Mission with the girls and I went over there to see if I could talk to her. It turned out the door was already locked. It was past opening, but as I turned to walk back to my car someone assaulted me, knocked me to the ground and raspy, alcohol tainted breath breathed down on my ear. I don't know what would have happened, but right at the moment a carload of rowdy teenage boys came zooming through the lot, screaming and yelling and whoever was on top of me ran off. Nothing really happened but I was traumatized. I never went back.

My job at State Farm was great when I was assigned to work with some of the career level women in our department. I got to travel and help run seminars for our top agents and do all sorts of wonderful things, but the woman who ran our department was horrible. She would go through our trash and check out any floppy disks to see if they were really useless and she did not train anyone. If you couldn't get trained yourself you would be out of luck. 

She had been told I could do anything and for some reason she just didn't like me. I've never had that problem before or since, but it made my life miserable. She bounced me from one person to another so I was always working for somebody different.  I had several people ask for me back, but she always had excuses for why that couldn't happen. Then she decided to have us all take the Myers Briggs test. Afterwards she called me in and said, "You are a square peg in a round hole and you better just get over it!"  I started looking for a new job. 

She wouldn't let anyone transfer out of her department, so I looked outside of State Farm and stumbled on Novak Flowers on Main St. I had no idea what a job there would be like. I imagined just waltzing in and arranging flowers in vases. I got the job! However I learned their flower arrangers had degrees in some kind of horticulture or design. One even had a masters degree! I worked in the front showroom answering the phone and helping customers. They said there were no benefits and I would start at the minimum wage for six months, but a couple months later they gave me a big increase and when my State Farm Cobra insurance expired, they paid half my health insurance on a private policy! It was a family business and such a great place to work. I loved it there. I learned how to take orders for funerals and weddings and just general flowers. I learned to use the computer to do long distance flowers and in my spare time I plucked the roses and fluffed the carnations! I felt like one of the family. I never learned to make bows though! It became a standing joke that I would wear out my practice ribbon before I ever got a presentable bow, but I knew how to snip the ends of stalks and wrap them in wire for simple vases. I knew how to add a bit of filler and I helped people identify the potted plants in the greenhouse. It was a very fulfilling job. By the time I moved on I knew the name of almost all the plants and flowers.

During this time I got a call that my father had died. My brother's friend, a nurses assistant, had been feeding him breakfast and he simply died right then. No pain. No suffering, but unexpected. He was just a few months short of his 73 rd. birthday, I had asked him what he wanted for Christmas and he said all he wanted was to be with my mother. He died December 26, 2000 and in some ways I was happy for him. He was a man who had started college at barely sixteen and been called one of the most intelligent men the Superintendent of Public Education had ever met when I was a child. The nursing home had nothing to help him stay mentally active or happy and he had no will power left. Eman8tions and Jim played at his funeral and I gave a speech about his life. It was the best I could do. To me he was the greatest man I've ever known.

The condo elected a new board and they decided the snow needed to be scraped off the roof tops that winter. We'd never done this in Illinois and it was a bad idea. They destroyed big parts of the roof, dropped snow down on my deck crushing my furniture and left some apartments with big leaks in their ceilings. Mine was fine but everyone's condo fees went up way over a hundred dollars. My mortgage was reevaluated and went down.

Eman8tions and I were seeing each other regularly by then. My first attempts at using my own charge cards had left me with two large accounts. I wanted to pay them off and I wanted to move closer to him so I wouldn't have to drive so far when he didn't come to my house. I began house hunting in Taylorville, Illinois where my siblings lived. Life was much less expensive there.

I finally rented a small house a block from my brother's ex-wife and on moving day I rented a big moving van and drove it to my condo. Then two of Jim's friends came to help me since he now lived in Seattle. My sister also came, bringing her new boyfriend who turned out to be more of a hindrance than anything. He insisted he knew how to pack everything into the truck and turned what should have been a couple of hours into almost a whole day. It was frustrating because I was paying the boys and they were doing their best in spite of him. Eman8tions helped too, but he had to leave early to get back to St.Louis. My sister's boyfriend drove the van to Taylorville.